People ending their lives?

[girlfriend44]

Are more and more people giving up on life? Heard another suicide today and its going to be debated in Parliament tomorrow?

Is it because mental health services are poor, have they always been poor?
Is life just getting harder for people?
Or has it always been hard?

I can remember when suicide was rare now you hear it so much sadly.

I am not surprised by this.

There was also a scheme called Serenity Integrated Mentoring (or High Intensity Network) that also sought to criminalise people having a MH crisis as a way to manage them.

@XenoBitch it's outrageous and terrifying.
I went to secondary mental health care in crisis yesterday. The duty nurse told me I mustn't cry in the waiting room as everyone there had "something to be sad about".

I'm sorry, @Flensburg. Basic kindness has been lost in many services/staff. I'm sure there are multiple reasons, but the outcome for people in desperate situations and mental ill-health is fucking bleak.

💙

@WristCandy , thank you.

Sorry to hear that. I have also had some really crappy comments from supposed MH professionals.
I hope today has been a little kinder to you

In my experience a lot of the frustration is because there is a long wait to see an over-worked member of staff with too many people on their caseload who discharges you/signposts you/gives you some leaflets and you never see them again.

Sometimes people who are suicidal/have attempted suicide are turned away.

CAMHS is a particular issue for me - they have repeatedly refused referrals for DS, despite his constant distress at existing. He talks about wanting to die all the time, but essentially because he's autistic they won't do anything. The paediatrician who diagnosed the autism referred him and they refused.

And primary care mental health services - I know they can't magic up solutions, but is 'try mindfulness for a few weeks and let us know how you're getting on' in any way an appropriate response to 'my mental health is suffering because I'm being physically attacked most days by my child, who also keeps me up for most of the night'? Thankfully after the few weeks they referred me to short term counselling - only six weeks, but the counsellor I saw was so worried about me she wrangled another two weeks for me. Since then nothing - but tbh I've been too busy trying to juggle work, DS needs, getting help and support for DS, and working round various appointments and meetings about DS.

This topic is far too personal and emotive to thoughtlessly condemn people's attitudes as disgusting. Their feelings will be shaped by their own traumatic experiences. A little compassion for people's complex and traumatic grief (of which anger is often a common reaction) wouldn't go amiss.

Neither you or @Fionaville are wrong. Both things can be true at the same time - 1. It feels selfish, thoughtless and beyond devastating for those left behind. 2. AND also - It wasn't actually meant in that way and the person needed help and support as they weren't in their right mind.

Condemning someone who is clearly still affected by these losses is not compassionate or helpful..

I was thinking about my best friend who ultimately ended her life. In her 20s she was a party girl, did everything to the max and was a functioning alcoholic. She was possibly bi polar but thought she was schizophrenic. We think she had a bad reaction to LSD or strong marijuana because one day she was very unwell and ended up being sectioned. Then she moved to her home city in Midlands away from London. When she lived in London she was offered counselling and yoga on NHS. She was only offered medication and hospitalised again and again in midlands. One day after about 3 years living there she rang me in tears as she’d been told she’d been overprescribed massively her main medication and the doctors wanted her to reduce the dose a lot. It had made her put on a lot of weight and lactate. She kept saying to me “how can I trust the doctors now?”. About 2-3 months after this conversation (I was about to go and see her) she ended her own life. I strongly believe the doctors were at fault there and so do her family.

Please ALWAYS call your friends and family in the middle of the night if you need to. They would far rather a call from you than s knock at the door from the police. Can they offer a rota that are on call for you? You are more important than anything they are doing the follow on day. Please talk to them today and organise shifts so someone is always there for you 247

Not everyone has this kind of support in terms of family members or friends.

I remember chatting to a woman who had been suicidal but was fine now. At her lowest point she realised she just didn't have anyone she could rely on like that, and call in the middle of the night.

I think yes, after a suicide happens, lots of people would wish the dead person had got in touch and asked for help.

The reality is those same people often make it very clear they are not available for anything other than a weekly chat over a coffee. And there's nothing really wrong with that - people need to have boundaries because oftentimes they are very tirrd or stressed to the hilt in their own lives and don't have capacity to do a night shift on duty for a suicidal friend.

I realise that @Newchapterbeckons said that in a reply to a specific situation, @OnTheAlert, but more generally you are so right. I have absolutely no one to call, day or night. Not because I've worn people out, there simply isn't anyone.

I have told less than a handful of (non-professional) people when feeling suicidal. It's not something I'd do unless absolutely desperate. My mum and sister simply ignored it and never referred to it again. One friend told me later that she had been worried, but she didn't even contact me again for months. I had previously been there for her in similar circumstances despite being the other side of the world.

Just reach out, they say. Tell someone. Ask for help. Good luck with that.

There are people who kill themselves having told no one, I don't want to ignore that. I just don't understand it. I can only imagine that their experience was very different.

Please don't assume that there is anyone to reach out to.

@OnTheAlert well said. Unfortunately the flipside of that is that I’ve been suicidal a lot and sometimes a stranger from Samaritans just asking you a bunch of questions, however kindly they listen, isn’t a substitute for just a hug and knowing you’re worth something to someone who actually knows you. It’s a tricky one. Also nowadays even if the friend/family is happy to chat on the phone for example they’re probably asleep (or dealing with a crying baby) they’ll have their mobiles on silent, probably no other phone or unless you’re over about forty you don’t know anyone’s landline anyway.
Finally even telling my partner or friends that I’m having thoughts of self-harm let alone suicide is upsetting and stressful for them after a while and I don’t want to keep doing that to them.

I am suicidal but would never let anyone know (family, friends, colleagues, acquaintances) because I wouldn’t want them to feel that they could/should have done something to prevent it.
I have shared my plans with MH professionals before but that inevitably has consequences so I wouldn’t do that again.

@Fionaville your posts are very harsh and jugemental. You don't actually know what was going through the minds of either of your relatives shortly before they took their own lives. The fact that there are two in your family suggests there is a mental illness thread there and it's disappointing that you can not be more open to facing that rather than condemning people who die of this terrible illness.

If your attitude is typical in your family then it isn't surprising they did not confide in any of you. My family might say the same but of course they couldn't possibly know.

It is so totally heinous to blame SoSs for their loved one not confiding in them. It is rubbing salt into an open wound that never closes.how, after all you've read on here of people's whole lives bring shaped by that complicated grief, that guilt and those unanswered questions, do you think it's appropriate to say "well if you'd been nicer maybe they would have told you how they were feeling"??? How unutterably cruel is that??

What are you talking about? I haven't blamed anyone for someone taking their life. Don't be so wilfully dramatic.

I pointed out how being harsh and judgemental towards those with extreme illness is cruel and likely to add to the problem. What exactly is your problem with the truth? Attitudes like yours are exactly why some people feel ashamed of being mentally unwell.

It’s not straightforward is it? If it was, we wouldn’t be in the state we are in on a societal level in terms of mental health.

There are so many variables which impact on the individuals experience and even two people with the same (as much as possible) life story will experience it in different ways. What is selfish to some is self preservation or helplessness to others. Being angry at someone for killing themselves is no less acceptable than having the thoughts and feelings which lead someone to feel suicidal in the first place. To judge one as OK and the other as heinous is very subjective, just because you don’t feel that way it doesn’t make it any less legitimate.

Having a mental health problem and being a difficult person are not mutually exclusive, sometimes because of the illness, sometimes just because they’re a bit of a twat.

My problem is I am a survivor of suicide and have spent the last 5 years in intense emotional distress (and, yes, poor mental health) because of the thought I could/should have done more, given more, been kinder, realised how serious things were getting. As I imagine a lot of the other people who have posted on this thread have who lost someone this way. If you haven't experienced this then you won't have any idea what I'm talking about.

Telling a survivor how they should process their loved one's suicide, and finger wagging at them for not being kinder, for "adding to the problem" that led to their loved one's death, when you have NO IDEA about that situation, is sanctimonious and cruel. And on whose behalf? You'd rather hurt someone living through enormous pain now, to defend someone who is already dead and beyond pain (and certainly meant a lot more to the poor sod you're chastising than they could possibly mean to you)?

Seriously just stop it.

Ffs

I thought about this just the other day, after a big newspaper headline about a new blood test to show whether you’re going to get Alzheimer’s.

Who on earth would want to know they’re going to get a horrible disease with no cure?

I foresee suicides from this, especially regarding people who already have far too much experience of it in close relatives. (Like me 😩)

And I doubt it’d be any good waiting until the signs are obvious, because it’s pretty common for people with Alz. to fail to understand that there’s anything wrong with them. Not only can they not remember anything, they can’t - at any given moment - remember that they can’t remember anything - if that makes sense.

I think in general we aren't great as a society at accepting that not all problems and challenges are solvable. We'd rather blame the person for "not trying hard enough" or "being defeatist" because it's easier than considering that you yourself could find yourself in a situation you can't figure your way out of.

When it comes to things like, chronic poor mental health, shit life syndrome or social isolation I think it's important to look at both potential solutions as well as ways to live with and manage it as best as the person can if it's not a fixable thing.

@SisterSabotage It's clear to me that you are a complete wind up who hasn't even read all of my comments. I you had, you would have known that the two relatives are from different sides of the family and were completely unrelated to each other. So your diagnosis of 'the mental illness thread' is invalid.
If there is a way of reaching anyone, who is planning suicide, with a message about not potentially killing or hurting other people, when they do it, then I'll say it! Only a completely self absorbed arsehole would find offence in that.
You have no idea the impact that those circumstances have on loved ones. Grief is hard enough. Grief after suicide is a different kind of grief. Than add in the fact that your loved one hasn't just ended their own lives, but has endangered countless other people. And they've left behind children of their own, who up until that moment had a loving and apparently happy parent. But now that parents gone and they have hurt other people in the process.
You have absolutely no idea who you are talking to on here. About such an emotive subject. You clearly lack the emotional intelligence to understand how these circumstances would impact the living.

I agree with this.

The 4 men I know in the past, eg 10 years who've ended their lives. Two of them were divorced and struggling a bit with that and other issues. The other two were married, but again, pressures, work and family. What I take from this, is that talk and dialogue around problems is often not enough or taken up. One man had spoken to his best friend (who'd moved abroad for work) and his family about his depression and mental health issues.

People can read the title and see whether to read it 🙄

Unfortunately public services are very overstretched and under resourced.

The Samaritans can be helpful but I think it isn't as good as it used to be. Possibly due to a lack of volunteers. In addition many listeners just encourage callers to call the doctor which isn't really the point. Many volunteers lack streetwise awareness of what viable help is actually out there. Everybody gets inadvertently fobbed off. There is nowhere to turn.

And if people read the whole thread, they will see that on 16 th January I apologised for my post, which was written in good faith and trying to be considerate to those who may be upset by this thread.