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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.
Unlike the rest of the sheep, we for some odd reason do not like that.
The primal roots of suicide are buried in religion and thoughts of an after-life. The sooner people wake up to that fact and seek to correct it, the better.
The whole notion of "something better than this" or "anything is better than this" assumes there is a "thing". There isn't. There is nothing. And nothing is not an "escape", it is nothing. Period.
If people did not feel there was somewhere or something better to escape to, they would not be offing themselves.
Really ? Moron.
How much "mental illness" is involved in someone living in constant pain, which cannot be removed by any kind of medication, who's request it is to end that pain ?
And how much "mental illness" is involved when someone, who has been told that his illness will progress in a way which will involve months of such pain and/or turn him into a vegetable or being prognosed with dementia, requests to forgo that future -- for him as well as the ones who care for him (literal as well as figurativily) ?
And how much "mental illness" is involved in a kid being bullied every day, who than, mostly after having endured years of it, decides to take his life because he does not see any other solution (the world around him is willingly deaf to his troubles) ?
Yes, I know. That above suicide would certainly be preventable. But we're talking about your "mental illness" here, not the willfull stupidity of other people.
"Please start brains before engaging mouth"
I myself hope to, in the future, have the right to choose my own moment of dying in pretty much the same way as I'm expected to choose the moment of dying for a pet that I own -- you do not let them suffer needlessly (its even a social no-no). Yet on the other hand we cannot seem to think about even more beloved family members in the same way, and allow them to decide for themselves. Go figure.