To be angry that people don't grasp you can't stop adults ending their life

[Differentstarts]

I'm getting really annoyed about people's perceptions around mental health and suicide. And the news recently has highlighted it. All the people saying why didn't anyone stop it. Firstly you don't know what people's family and friends did. Secondly how do you suppose you can stop a grown adult making a choice.
My best friend ended her life I spent hours and hours over a period of months trying to convince her not to do this. I checked on her multiple times a day (think stalker level) after yet another overdose I begged the hospital to section her and they wouldn't. I took her to Dr appointments, to see her councillor and when she died I still got people asking me why I did nothing to stop it. So can someone please tell me how I was supposed to stop it as this is really pissing me off.
Yanbu You can't stop a grown adult doing what they want to do and only they can control that.
Yabu you should of done more (please tell me what?)

They’re not happy. The peace and calm you see is the person inside having given up and stopped fighting to stay alive.

Yes, I agree I have had good mental healthcare. I would not be here otherwise.

The issue here isn’t that a person cannot be saved because they have “chosen” suicide and “their autonomy should be respected”- the issue is that many cannot be saved today because the healthcare is currently inadequate and nowhere near where it needs to be to save lives. It isn’t impossible because the suicidal person is ‘adamant’ but it is simply not as possible as it can be because mental health is not properly resourced or understood. Medications are hit or miss. Therapies are one size fits all and therefore helps hardly anyone.

I would love to see the day one can walk into A&E and receive tailored help like anyone with cancer or heart disease would.

Exactly my point.

As someone who works in mental health you are so correct.
When someone really decides to end their own life then they will do that. There's not actually anything anyone can do.
Unless there's obviously signs or they have been asking for help. But even then if you have a grown adult with capacity.. you cannot just lock them up indefinitely. You cannot watch them every second of the day.
You can if someone lacks capacity because they can be sectioned. You can if they are asking for help.
But if they are saying they don't need help and appear to have capacity....
No one can lock people up and watch them 24/7 on just them having occasionally mentioned they feel suicidal. There needs to be either real evidence they are intent on causing themselves harm or they need to be asking for help or engaging with services.
And some people won't engage with services and pretend to be OK if there's any risk of freedoms being removed from them. And they just decide to end their own lives.. and they do so in a way no one can stop because they go and do it without telling anyone.
And it's such a sad tragedy..
But it's an illness...
We know and accept that sometimes people will die of physical health issues because there's nothing anyone could do.
That's the same with mental health issues sometimes sadly.
And it's no ones fault. It's an illness. Sometimes people just don't recover.
I'm so sorry for your loss.

I'm saying when people do choose to end their life don't assume family and friends didn't help them. Their is only so much friends and family can do without backing from the nhs. And even then that's not always enough people kill themselves in psych wards all the time.

I completely agree with you here. My discomfort is in the discourse that seems to confuse the person with the illness. We need to separate the two like we do for physical illness. We’d never say that a person with cancer decided or chose to die, so why do we say that when a mental illness kills someone? We say we lost them to cancer. It’s the same imho with suicides, we are losing loved ones to an illness.

Not all suicides are due to mental ill health.

Such as?

People who go to Dignitas, people who have what some might call "shit life syndrome"... no MH illness, but just crap life circumstances.

Dignitas is assisted dying when already terminally ill with not long left to live and just a wish to go less painfully. This is not suicide, because the person is already dying.

Crap life circumstances are a risk factor for mental illness, which then can cause suicide.

I would argue that being actively suicidal when not terminally ill is proof of mental illness.

People facing awful charges in the criminal system kill them selves. Some high profile ones too.
Like I said in a PP, I saw one guy "attempt" on a bridge to avoid arrest. It did not work.
I was in hospital myself and there was a lady there with terminal cancer. She should never have been there, and was sent home in the end as the staff thought this too. She was on a section for attempting suicide due to wanting to avoid her inevitable end with her cancer. She used to just sit in the middle of the communal area and howl the place down. It was awful.
She was all smiles when her family came to take her home.

Someone who is facing illness, debt, criminal justice... all the MH help in the world wont help, as they are not mentally ill. They need practical help.

No you can't stop a person that's determined - only those that have been impulsive.
My mum was a suicide. Tried an overdose first but was 'saved' She was furious.

Told us straight that she'd go to the railway line next time and there'd be no saving her. And that is exactly what she did.

She was in a lot of pain. She had tried to get answers for 6 years. There was no other way to end her suffering. It wasn't a bad decision.

I absolutely agree with uou OP. I am so sorry to hear about your friend but glad she had a friend like you.

They need both practical help and mental healthcare. Illness, debt, criminal justice, grieving, divorce, injury, trauma…it’s pretty much on the charity sector to help with the mental impacts of these adverse life events.

Unfortunately some 50% of those who die by suicide die after having had no mental healthcare and so no mental illness is officially documented or diagnosed. These are imho, the undiagnosed who are actually mentally ill and the outcome of suicide is inevitable as they have had no mental healthcare.

*She was on a section for attempting suicide due to wanting to avoid her inevitable end with cancer.” I think of these terminally ill cases as not technically suicide but rather the already dying taking a bit of control over when and how they die.

I agree op, sometimes we must respect the choice that a grown adult makes to end their life. As horrible as it is, it is their suffering and their life.

Sometimes I think it's said by people who are deflecting their own guilt because they couldn't, or didn't 'do' anything. Or feel either wrongly or rightly that they contributed towards it either by action or inaction.
For some of those people, looking deeper into why may be very uncomfortable, so they look to others and ask why they couldn't and didn't do more.

There's a strong sense that someone ending their life only happens because someone is mentally ill, I don't think that's quite true, as another poster has touched on. I think people can do it to escape, that escape can be from a crippling mental illness, or a physical one, or a situation they have tried and failed to change, or in the cases we see of bullying and abuse - because of someone else's actions and behaviour.

I think many of those situations do lead to mental illness, maybe the person is at risk because of 'organic' factors and a situation tips them over the edge, or like a body, a mind can only take so much before it starts to break. But I don't think everyone who does it, only does it because of mental illness.

If someone has capacity, they're allowed to make their own decisions, even if we feel that decision is wrong, I also think that in the case of mental illness, the person may well have tried to get better and as with some physical illnesses, it just doesn't happen, and what a choice that is, between suffering until you die of something physical, with no let up or relief or dying at your own hand. Sometimes they have, or they feel they have, tried everything in their power and nothing has changed.

That's one perspective, but not everybody's perspective.

No, being actively suicidal isn't proof of mental illness. It may be a symptom but it is not always. It may comfort you to believe that suicidality is a mental illness or symptom of mental illness but it's not the case always.

So if all your family died you wouldn't be suicidal? Or if you were you'd be fine with someone calling you "mentally ill" for having a completely normal reaction to horrible circumstances?

I think that mental illness doesn't always need to be something a person has struggled with for many years. If a shock event happens you can still become suicidal overnight. It still means that your psyche doesn't cope right now and that you are unwell and need help.

See the prisoner stories, or the ones escaping from police or someone experiencing a tragic event.

Euthanasia isn't the same as suicide. Euthanasia hasnt got anything to do with the lack of mental health care.

With regards to shit life syndrome and suicide. I know someone who has had a shift life through no fault of his own. There is always some tragedy and some new shit waiting for him around the corner. He did attempt suicide.

Of course a 'shit life' would severely impact the persons mental health. I honestly don't know what some people imagine it is like? How could it not result in mental health issues? Mental health issues are a human response to shit circumstances. And if someone doesn't respond adversely to a such events I honestly cannot see how they'd become suicidal.

I agree. You can't stop somebody if they are consistently determined, and to be honest I'm not sure that you should repeatedly 'rescue' them even if it is possible. At least not an adult who is basically in their right mind, rather than having a MH flare up or a devastating but temporary experience of some kind.
It's tragic to experience the suicide of a family member or friend and the last thing you need is people trying to make you feel more guilty than you already do.

Sending you love, it's horrible when a loved one dies this way and i can't believe you've had such callous comments.

In some cases, interventions can help and can prevent suicide, and I think most people are expressing this, maybe sometimes clumsily. It sounds like that wasn't the case for your friend; I also know some people who had the best healthcare support and friends and family I could have imagined and it didn't change the outcome. I'm glad you realise that there's no blame on you. Some people are probably expressing wishful thinking - they don't want to believe there could ever be a situation where their own loved one could be in that situation.

If you're talking to people who are referring to other cases, you could say something like "Suicide and depression is a really complex topic, it's an upsetting one for me so I'd prefer to talk about something else!"
If you get comments directly about why you didn't help your best friend, I'd say something like:
To close friends/family: "That's not how it works unfortunately. I did everything I could. I recommend looking up Zero Suicide Alliance if you're wondering about it (or any resources you think are helpful), it's a useful resource about supporting people at risk of suicide". Sometimes suggesting another resource signals you're not up for a debate.
To people who aren't worth any benefit of the doubt, "Wow, that's a horrible thing to say!"