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Mental Health Experts Seek To Block the Paths To Suicide
HughPickens.com writes: Experts and laymen have long assumed that people who died by suicide will ultimately do it even if temporarily deterred. Now Celia Watson Seupel reports at the NY Times that a growing body of evidence challenges this view, with many experts calling for a reconsideration of suicide-prevention strategies to stress "means restriction." Instead of treating individual risk, means restriction entails modifying the environment by removing the means by which people usually die by suicide. The world cannot be made suicide-proof, of course. But, these researchers argue, if the walkway over a bridge is fenced off, a struggling college freshman cannot throw herself over the side. If parents leave guns in a locked safe, a teenage son cannot shoot himself if he suddenly decides life is hopeless.
Reducing the availability of highly lethal and commonly used suicide methods has been associated with declines in suicide rates of as much as 30%–50% in other countries (PDF). According to Cathy Barber, people trying to die by suicide tend to choose not the most effective method, but the one most at hand. Some methods have a case fatality rate as low as 1 or 2 percent," says Barber. "With a gun, it's closer to 85 or 90 percent. So it makes a difference what you're reaching for in these low-planned or unplanned suicide attempts." Ken Baldwin, who jumped from the Golden Gate Bridge in 1985 and lived, told reporters that he knew as soon as he had jumped that he had made a terrible mistake. "From the instant I saw my hand leave the railing, I knew I wanted to live. I was terrified out of my skull." Baldwin was lucky to survive the 220 foot plunge into frigid waters. Ms. Barber tells another story: On a friend's very first day as an emergency room physician, a patient was wheeled in, a young man who had shot himself in a suicide attempt. "He was begging the doctors to save him," she says. But they could not.
Reducing the availability of highly lethal and commonly used suicide methods has been associated with declines in suicide rates of as much as 30%–50% in other countries (PDF). According to Cathy Barber, people trying to die by suicide tend to choose not the most effective method, but the one most at hand. Some methods have a case fatality rate as low as 1 or 2 percent," says Barber. "With a gun, it's closer to 85 or 90 percent. So it makes a difference what you're reaching for in these low-planned or unplanned suicide attempts." Ken Baldwin, who jumped from the Golden Gate Bridge in 1985 and lived, told reporters that he knew as soon as he had jumped that he had made a terrible mistake. "From the instant I saw my hand leave the railing, I knew I wanted to live. I was terrified out of my skull." Baldwin was lucky to survive the 220 foot plunge into frigid waters. Ms. Barber tells another story: On a friend's very first day as an emergency room physician, a patient was wheeled in, a young man who had shot himself in a suicide attempt. "He was begging the doctors to save him," she says. But they could not.
I recently read a story of a Japanese girl who tried to commit suicide and almost succeeded, but someone tried to help her and ‘saved’ her. Afterwards she called for people not to ‘help’ people who want to die, because life still sucked and in addition she got a huge hospital bill and even more people who guarded her from suicide.
Suicide attempts fall broadly in two categories. 1) Cries for attention. These are almost always done in a non-lethal way, in my country these tend to be people with psychological issues who overdose on medicine. 2) People who's life really sucks. These tend to use more effective methods, generally resent being saved and often try again.
So I think we're going about this completely the wrong way if we start blocking ways to commit suicide. Effectively we're trying to turn suicidal people into prisoners. Instead we should be focussing on making the world a better place and their lives happier and worth living. And for cases where this is impossible, we should provide humane options for quitting.
it seems to me that making treatment free (it's expensive!) and encouraging people to get help rather than shaming them for feeling badly would be a better way to go.
society doesn't want spend money to help the mentally ill which ironically bites them in the ass because about 1/3 of the homeless have a form of (untreated) mental illnesses which is why they are homeless. it costs more to have social programs for the homeless than it does to actually help them or even give them homes! i'm sure it would cost much less if we had free treatment to prevent them from becoming homeless in the first place.
wake up, society!
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
Some people commit suicide because their life sucks so much they don't want to deal with it any more. People should be afforded the dignity to make their own choices without pseudo-altruistic nannying.
Others do so because they are defective. Selfish, attention-seeking losers who want everyone around them to be part of their pity party. Screw them. The gene pool is improved by their departure.
Oh, by the way, I have personally witnessed a suicide. A roommate blew his brains out in our living room because his "pain management" doctors couldn't manage his pain (neurological disease). I regretted his situation, but I respected his choice. I wished him godspeed as he gurgled his last auto-reflexive breaths.
Scruting the inscrutable for over 50 years.
If you are not in a fit state of mind when you get married, you can get an annulment. If you are not in a fit state of mind when you have the child, you can let the child be adopted or temporarily fostered. If you are not in a fit state of mind when you signed the mortgage, it can be nullified.
If you are not in a fit state of mind when you kill yourself, there is no going back.
I personally have no issues with suicide, even assisted suicide, so long as the person who has elected to kill themselves has done so in a fully concious, fit state of mind.
How on earth are firearm deaths underreported? I'm gonna call BS.
Yes, you can read the news, which isn't a good statistical reference since it's mainly about capturing eyeballs, and selling ads.
Just another day in Paradise
If you are not in a fit state of mind when you get married, you can get an annulment. If you are not in a fit state of mind when you have the child, you can let the child be adopted or temporarily fostered.
I'm not sure which country you're living in but it's not one I've ever heard of.
Suicide is a problem which overwhelmingly affects men. If you get married the only usual out is divorce, which means that men in 99% of cases are on the hook for support for the rest of their lives. If you're identified as the father of the child, the situation is the same. There have been cases in the US where men who donated to sperm banks, men who were raped by women when they were underaged, men who weren't even related to the child have been forced to pay child support.
This is the situation locally:
- 99 percent of husbands lose their homes during divorces
- Judges frequently make child maintenance orders against men on state benefits whose marriages have broken down - leaving many living below national insolvency guidelines, below subsistence levels
- In seven out of ten cases the judge ordered a transfer of the property into the wife’s name
- During 160 contested cases when an order was made to sell the home the wife received more than half of the proceeds in 25 percent of the cases, during the other 75 percent the proceeds were split
- Joint custody does not mean shared parenting, with children in more than nine out of 10 cases living with their mothers- the "standard access" for married dads to their children after separation is "a couple of hours" every second week, with a few hours once or twice during the week
- In no cases were the views of any child heard directly by a judge
- A significant number of divorce cases take eight years or more to be concluded
- 100% of maintenance orders, both child and spousal maintenance, are made in favour of the wife
It absolutely is reflected in most western countries.
If we're going to deal with the problem, let's deal with the problem. This article seems like political power grabbing and grandstanding on the backs of the dead, which is beyond reprehensible and shows the vile moral character of those proposing it.
Nothing but more theory and anecdote.
"You can reduce the rate of suicide in the United States ... if fewer people had guns in their homes ..."
Total nonsense. The number of households with firearms has been on a multi-decade downward trend:
http://www.slate.com/blogs/the...
Meanwhile, the suicide rate per 100k people has been quite stable at 10-15 per 100k over the last 60 years:
http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/...
So where's the evidence that fewer gun-owning households means a lower suicide rate?
The ONLY consistently documented relationship between firearms and suicide is this:
"Some methods have a case fatality rate as low as 1 or 2 percent ... with a gun, it's closer to 85 or 90 percent."
True and I'm sure that in their so-called "study", the 10-15% of people who survived a self-inflicted gunshot wound regret it and claim it was an impulsive act, but that's hardly "proof" that access to firearms was a causal factor in suicide attempts.
This also raises the important question of how many people really want to die and how many are just desperate for attention. The "cry for help" suicide is a well known and documented fact. If you slice your wrists perpendicular to the length of the arm, you're either incompetent or you don't really want to commit suicide. Fire a 12 gauge shotgun in your mouth and there's zero doubt that you're genuinely trying to kill yourself.
Note also that the USA is #30 worldwide in suicide rate, far behind many countries with strict gun control laws. Take Japan for example with a rate of 20.7/100k.
This is just a bunch of leftist academics trying to further the gun control agenda without real evidence. Gun control groups like Michael Bloomberg's astroturf "Everytown" are actually pushing laws requiring that all firearms in private homes be locked up ... where they will be useless for defense. And imagine police getting search warrants and breaking down your door because someone saw a gun on your nightstand? Insanity..
I am not alone in the opinion that the horrible American diet does not only cause obesity. It also causes all manner of health problems, including mental ones. If people ate healthier foods and therefore got the nutrients their bodies need, and eliminated the excess simple carbs, pesticides, pollutants, and common inflammation-causing irritants, then people would feel a hell of a lot better. We already know that depression is linked with brain inflammation, which diet customization can ameliorate. Depression is also linked with poor diet because serotonin is stored in the gut lining, which is commonly eroded in people who eat a bad diet. That's why so many people say SSRI's don't work -- there's no serotonin to selectively reuptake inhibit.
And of course, no MD would ever be smart enough to tell you to take 5HTP. That's the other problem. We're trained to think of doctors like they're priests. They're just technicians, many of whom just barely made the cut. And I wear to you, the first thing they do when you enter med school is excise the parts of your brain that contain any nutritional knowledge. When a gastroenterologist tells me he doesn't believe in food allergies, you know there's a problem. So, the one group of people we should be listening to for nutritional advice know absolutely nothing about it. In fact, it's a general incompetence among MDs (remember, most are just technicians specializing in narrow areas of medicine) that is the reason so many people are afraid of vaccines. Who's pushing the vaccines? The same people who tell you your chronic symptoms are all in your head. (Those chronic symptoms are probably nutrition-related, BTW.)
A high school in the southeastern US switched their lunch program to all healthy foods. McDonalds out. Salads and generally good variety in. Behavioral problems went down, absenteeism went down, grades went up. No surprise there. (Incidentally, shifting high school hours slightly later in the day, to adapt to the teen sleep cycle, has some similar effects, so we can't say it's ALL nutrition. That's just one major factor. Imagine doing both!)
Eat better.
It is largely a cultural thing as well. If you look at a ranking of countries by suicide rate, no country in the top 10 are guns easily and legally acquired. Some, like Japan and South Korea, gun ownership is nearly impossible. But countries like the U.S. and Switzerland, having the highest gun ownership, rank 30 and 44 respectively.
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No. Women use drugs more often, and those are much more often counted as accident. At school in Australia I had a dorm mate who committed suicide with a prescription opioid overdose. We all knew she was depressed. It was ruled accident, because unlike self inflicted death by gun which are always ruled suicide, drug overdose is treated the opposite way by Coroners. With overdose, absent affirmative proof of intent to commit suicide, it is ruled an accident. In short if there are gun cleaning materials out, or if a person is hunting, as is in the case with a tiny fraction of one percent of self inflicted gunshot, it WILL be ruled a suicide. In contrast unless there is a note or the family is volunteering the victim had severe depression, a prescription or illicit drug overdose is always an "accident". The fact is, within a given demographic, self caused "accidental deaths are higher among those without guns. Think Philip Seymor Hoffman who was clinically depressed, took a MASSIVE and clearly lethal dose, and was ruled an "accident."
The UK used to sell acetaminophen (AKA Tylenol) in bottles (like in the US).
Some people committed suicide by OD'ing on the pills.
So they changed from bottles to blister packs.
Now if you want to off yourself that way, you have to sit there and pop out ~50 pills, one by one.
It reduced those sucides by something like 30%.
That's a lot of lives saved, with a pretty low barrier.
The person who equated this article to advocating "blocking the exits" is exactly right. The individual who actually plans to end their life in a fully conscious, fit state of mind has also surely come up with a plan that will get around any number of "blocked exit" strategies (like locking up personal guns in a cabinet, or hiding the keys to the car). They're not who this article refers to, IMO.
But the person who is distraught enough to actually go through with a plan that has a high likelihood of ending their life (as opposed to FAR more of them who might talk about it or use a half-hearted attempt as attention-seeking behavior) are going to do it when the mood strikes them. And the original article seems to be saying it's effective and appropriate to remote as many possible means to accomplish this as possible, so the means will be lacking when the mood strikes.
My problem with this is that it's only a band-aid for the underlying issue ... someone's severe depression. If it's not possible to get a person to get back the will to live, what quality of life do they have anyway, while you've "succeeded in preventing their suicide" by locking all of your knives up in a box?
Automakers spend billions of dollars making their cars more safe, going to great lengths to add features that increase survivability. The government sets standards that must be met if the car is allowed to be sold.
But the don't ban cars.
Local governments and state/national governments spend millions of dollars making lakes, rivers and beaches more safe, by adding signage, marking hazards and swimming areas, hiring lifeguards, building lighthouses, etc.
But they don't ban swimming.
Just about every plastic bag is marked with warnings not to allow children to play with them. Lampcords and blinds have standards now that are supposed to make them safer and more difficult for young children to hang themselves.
But they don't ban plastic bans...well, except for those at grocery stores.
"408 being murdered by a parent/family member" How many of those were by gun?
How many of hose were women protecting themselves from abusive husbands?
"58 dying from exposure (cold)" Governments all over the world, including the USA, have programs subsidizing fuel for the poor. Lots of effort and money is spent predicting the weather and issuing cold weather / winter storm warnings.
But they don't require everyone to own a coat and use it.
"228 from burning to death" - The government spends a huge amount of money on fire education and local municipalities subsidize smoke detectors, CO detectors, and other fire safety items. Etc.
But they don't ban matches.
So we do take action to try to prevent those causes of deaths. blah blah blah
Make no mistake, this not about Suicides. It's about control. In this particular case, control of guns. They wrap it all up in nice sounding platitudes, but in the end, their goal is clear.
You can't Idiot Proof the world. And you shouldn't try.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.