How to Deal with Suicidal People
That's a pretty spicy title I have on this post, isn't it? Pretty sure between that and the tags, most people who follow me aren't going to see this one, there's a good chance tumblr will filter it out of people's feeds too, and if I link it on other sites, that'll probably get vanished the same way. That's pretty common when this subject gets raised, and if someone says or gives the impression they're going to do the thing that's so taboo in that title that we have to hide it from people, THAT sets off flags to do all kinds of stuff like lock someone out of their own account for a while, maybe send them an automated e-mail with some weird copy-paste message about how concerned the detection algorithm is for them and the number for a hotline or two. And this is all a huge huge problem when it comes to prevention.
Cards on the table here, a big part of why I'm writing this is that a moderator somewhere just kinda contacted me out of the blue the other day to inform me, more or less, A- that I come across as something of a downer, just kinda generally, nothing specific or recent, B- I am enough of one that people are pretty generally convinced it's likely I may die by my own hand, and C- I need to go away so nobody has to watch if I do, specifically noting "no one here is equipped or trained to deal with life or death situations."
Now at this point, I had two main thoughts. Three if you count "WTF?" Because again, this wasn't about anything recent from me. I had actually been having one of the better days I'd had in quite some time, and wow did suddenly having THIS pop up just completely wreck my day. If I'd actually been in a dangerous state of mind, something like this would be very likely to give me that last push over the edge. So very much let's keep this in the "don't do this" box. But the other thought I had was "Well I mean, I'm here, and I'm happy to train people a bit on this." Which, you know, is why I'm writing this blog post. Because as I understand it I'm not welcome in that community there just now and all.
So yeah, bit of a disclaimer, I do not, in fact, have any sort of formal training from anyone in suicide prevention. Purely self-taught. But I have an inordinate amount of experience with this particular subject (I spent the better part of a year back in 2014 just sort of volunteering as an on-call up-all-night emotional support for anyone I saw that might need one, and talked a
whole lot of people through some real dangerous nights), and quite frankly I don't think the sort of people with specific training on this that people are so often quick to note they don't have on hand do not actually exist. In fact, let's start off with that, because here's some more big ol' don'ts to keep in mind.
Plainly, the first thought nearly everyone has when they get it in their heads that someone is seriously at risk of doing something maybe is to shove a hotline in their face, and I am reasonably certain absolutely nobody who does this has actually called such a hotline themselves nor even really put a lot of thought into what happens when one actually calls one of these.
The reason hotlines exist... not even this specific sort of hotline, I'm talking about the entire concept of any hotline, is that if someone is dealing with an emergency, they can call this number and talk to someone about it right the hell now. Like, 911 is a hotline. If your house is on fire, you want to get hold of someone who can help with fires right at that moment. You don't want to be asking around to see if anyone you know has a big hose, you don't want to be waiting until normal business hours the next day, right now.
Thing is, there is no big hose you can hook up to a thing on the street and spray someone with a big blast of Want To Keep Being Alive Juice. The best we can manage here is "here is someone who is willing to talk to anyone who calls this here phone number we are telling people to call if they feel suicidal and need to talk to someone about it in an emergency." The person at the other end is going to be Just Some Volunteer. They aren't going to have any special secret knowledge. They aren't particularly likely to have any other resources to point you at. In my experience they aren't even given as much advice as I'm trying to give here. It's just someone who has signed on to talk to very depressed and desperate people, who have nobody else to talk to, and hopefully someone else around to pass the phone to if they can't deal with the psychic damage they volunteered to tank.
The key part of that though is having nobody else to talk to. Imagine you're having just the worst day. Someone you know died you lost your job and the top scoop of your ice cream cone just fell off right over a sewer grate. You maybe wanna cry, you definitely want someone to just be nice to you and maybe try to help with that, but you're not going to just like... lock eyes with the next person you see on the street, run up to them, and start bawling your eyes out, right? You're going to want to talk to a friend or family member, or several such. You want to snuggle your pets. This is a basic concept, yeah? This is something everyone just intuitively understands? OK, so stop telling people you know to call a hotline! Talk to them yourself! You are the superior option, and the hotline is a stopgap for if you aren't there!
And you know, since I'm trans, I can't really avoid the elephant in the room here and note that Trans Lifeline isn't even a hotline. If you tell someone to call that number, in particular, you need to know that you are setting up a situation where the person you are talking to, when in a really dangerous state of mind, is going to call a number everyone constantly posts, navigate a short phone tree, hear a ring, and then have a recorded message explain that there is nobody there to talk to and they should maybe try calling back on a weekday between 10 AM and 6 PM Pacific. Generally people who are considering not being alive in a serious way and having nobody to talk to about it are in that dangerous mental space pretty late at night, or maybe on a weekend when there's less routine stuff to stay distracted. And there are few things worse when you're desperate for someone to talk to than a recording that the anti-suicide staff don't have time for you.
The non-trans numbers of course are also really bad to push on trans people because I don't know if you've noticed this but the average person is kinda totally clueless about trans people, and will at best probably have a lot of really clueless and invasive questions and suggestions informed by terrible stereotypes and such, so I wold not recommend pushing that number on people either. The number to give people, to once again reiterate my point here, is YOUR NUMBER. Tell your sad friends they can call you absolutely any time, not to worry about waking you up or interrupting them, and really sell them on how OK it is for them to do so. Definitely do this with friends, and honestly, if you think you can handle it and aren't exposing yourself to someone dangerous, go ahead and make an offer like that to people you barely know, or people you have until that point had a one-sided relationship with, like they write a comic you like or something. Still beats a total rando at the other end of a phone who's been getting trauma dumped on them for hours by other people already.
The next big pitfall is a lot of people get this idea that if someone has been really depressed and seemed like they might do something bad and you haven't heard from them in a bit, there's that thing you can do right, where you call the police and have them "do a wellness check" on someone? NEVER DO THIS. This is a whole separate point here so I don't want to dwell on it too much, but aside from self-selecting for violent bigots who want to throw their weight around, all cops are given "training" that traumatizes the hell out of them and teaches them to expect being ambushed by people trying to randomly kill them 30 times in a given day, and then also given guns. So if you have a cop go "check on" someone it's going to lower the odds of them killing themselves only in that it is dramatically increasing the odds that some trigger-happy terrified-out-of-his-mind-at-all-times cop will freak out and murder them. And even the best case scenario (someone once "wellness checked" me because I went to bed super early and wasn't answering my phone) it is an absolutely terrifying experience just having someone pounding madly on your front door and saying it's the police.
Our final maybe questionable idea is pushing therapy on someone. Now to be clear, I do generally think that finding a good therapist is a good idea in general, and if someone is very depressed it's a particularly good idea because hey, here's this person clearing out an hour or so every week just to talk to you about whatever sucks in your life, but if we're specifically talking about the big S word, it can be dicey? Depends on the therapist, depends on the person, but there are some situations where someone will go "oh hey you seem suicidal, I'm arranging for you to go spend some time in a mental hospital" and mental hospitals kinda really really suck and are nightmarish and basically never the right plan. I'm lucky enough to have one who isn't inclined to hit me with that, but if you've gotten this far I bet you can guess what her fix is if I'm seeming disinclined to continue living. That's right! Talk to friends more!
So there's our big don'ts and our maybe-don't covered. How about the dos. There's really just kinda the one. If you think someone is maybe suicidal,
be really damn nice.
Basically, people get suicidal when Stuff Is Really Bad, they can't think of anything that can fix it, and it feels like just existing is doing harm in some way to someone. If you can actually help someone with problems they can't fix, that's cool, but it's still good to just talk. Someone's clearly depressed, maybe actually asking for help? OK, pull'em aside for a private conversation. Do the real active listening thing. You have nothing else you're doing, you can talk as long as the need. You like this person, you know this person is generally well liked in whatever community/space you're both in. I'm personally against lying so if one of these things definitely isn't true I'm not going to pretend it is, but the point is, you're being welcoming, you're there for'em, you're really listening to their problems.
If this is someone you don't know, feel free to try and fix that, work out what they like to do, get'em talking about that. Hopefully it's something neat and you can say so and get'em geeking out about it. Maybe share relatable experiences to what they're dealing with. Maybe offer some nice distractions, like you go watch a movie together or play a game or something. Just get the person's brain onto any other track. And when someone inevitably has to sleep, remind them you're up for this sort of talk whenever. Maybe proactively check in the next day and a bit after that. Mostly though, yeah, just be kind, be welcoming, actively listen. Anyone can do this, it doesn't take special training, and I have never missed with it.
#suicide prevention