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Suicide Data Reveal New Intervention Spots, Such as Motels and Animal Shelters

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Re: Suicide Data Reveal New Intervention Spots, Such as Motels and Animal Shelters

#61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People who feel their lives are so terrible it isn't worth going on are usually not monsters. It's usually someone else in their lives that is a monster. They usually just have too many problems, not enough support and have spent too many years wrestling with it without resolution. If they were monsters, they would probably be planning someone else's death, not their own. It seems all too common that people around th…

Where can adults living with this kind of thing, like extreme bullying or psychopathy, get help moving on to better their lives?

A really good first step can be your doctor, who can lay out options and resources. Think of them as a knowledgeable first responder.

It worked for me.

Re: Suicide Data Reveal New Intervention Spots, Such as Motels and Animal Shelters

#62
post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where can adults living with this kind of thing, like extreme bullying or psychopathy, get help moving on to better their lives?

A really good first step can be your doctor, who can lay out options and resources. Think of them as a knowledgeable first responder. It worked for me.

Don't have a doctor. What kind of things were they able to suggest which was helpful?

Re: Suicide Data Reveal New Intervention Spots, Such as Motels and Animal Shelters

#63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not. The idea that a rag-tag group of citizens with a stockpile of AR-15s could challenge "tyranny" by fighting a modern US military is laughable.

And yet, the idea is that they should be allowed the opportunity. If a government is unilaterally in complete control of all people at all times, full stop, then there isn't any real freedom, is there? You'd just be subecting all of society to the whim of whoever had enough money and/or guns aleady to have taken power. But this is no place to have that discussion. Besides which, most people who express the opinion yo…

False dichotomy.

The government doesn’t have to be in unilateral control for us to admit that citizens would have a very difficult time fighting the extremely well funded and trained military. (For the most part, they wouldn’t need to anyway, they have control of something far more powerful... banking, they’d freeze your funds and you’d be done for).

It doesn’t follow that a government that you can’t fight via conventional means gives the populous no recourse. Voting rights are still the law of the land here and civil disobedience has been effective in the past.

Secondarily it could be argued (very easily) that second amendment in the USA is about the right to maintain well regulated local militias, which at the time would have been populated by yeoman farmers bringing their own weapons.

Historically this is relevant because the revolution was fought by exactly such a set of militias on the continental side, and the British obviously thought this was an illegal action. So they needed a clause “this thing we’re doing is legal and legitimate.”

Buut there’s a difference here between a militiaman with a musket that can fire maximum 3 shots per minute, as part of the local defense force, and an independent yobbo with a hundred of round per minute assault rifle.

But no one focuses on the part of the second amendment that pertains to ‘well regulated militias’, it’s almost as if an industry that makes something with a limited audience outside of military and law enforcement has an agenda and is influencing the debate.

Re: Suicide Data Reveal New Intervention Spots, Such as Motels and Animal Shelters

#64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People who feel their lives are so terrible it isn't worth going on are usually not monsters. It's usually someone else in their lives that is a monster. They usually just have too many problems, not enough support and have spent too many years wrestling with it without resolution. If they were monsters, they would probably be planning someone else's death, not their own. It seems all too common that people around th…

An uncle of mine blew his brains out a couple of years ago after a decade of struggling with mental health issues. I used to get so enraged at him for abandoning his family in that way. For some reason, your post really brought home to me that maybe what he was seeking was a way out, that he couldn't live with what the person he had become was putting his family through and that maybe he did it because to him that wa…

I hope you and your family have been able to find peace or are at least able to work toward it... I am so sorry for your loss.

There's a quote in the novel Infinite Jest that changed my perception on suicide. This passage helped me make some sense of something so terrible. It helped me see that I honestly can't even imagine what's going through the head of someone who is going against every human instinct to otherwise survive.

“The so-called ‘psychotically depressed’ person who tries to kill herself doesn’t do so out of quote ‘hopelessness’ or any abstract conviction that life’s assets and debits do not square. And surely not because death seems suddenly appealing. The person in whom Its invisible agony reaches a certain unendurable level will kill herself the same way a trapped person will eventually jump from the window of a burning high-rise. Make no mistake about people who leap from burning windows. Their terror of falling from a great height is still just as great as it would be for you or me standing speculatively at the same window just checking out the view; i.e. the fear of falling remains a constant. The variable here is the other terror, the fire’s flames: when the flames get close enough, falling to death becomes the slightly less terrible of two terrors. It’s not desiring the fall; it’s terror of the flames. And yet nobody down on the sidewalk, looking up and yelling ‘Don’t!’ and ‘Hang on!’, can understand the jump. Not really. You’d have to have personally been trapped and felt flames to really understand a terror way beyond falling.”

Re: Suicide Data Reveal New Intervention Spots, Such as Motels and Animal Shelters

#65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People who feel their lives are so terrible it isn't worth going on are usually not monsters. It's usually someone else in their lives that is a monster. They usually just have too many problems, not enough support and have spent too many years wrestling with it without resolution. If they were monsters, they would probably be planning someone else's death, not their own. It seems all too common that people around th…

Where can adults living with this kind of thing, like extreme bullying or psychopathy, get help moving on to better their lives?

I don’t know of any catch all resource. Is this something going on right now, or in your past? If it’s right now, the focus will be on separating yourself from the problem. If it’s the past, then that’s recovery. If you send me an email (my last name at gmail) I could point you to some things that helped me and could apply to your situation.

Re: Suicide Data Reveal New Intervention Spots, Such as Motels and Animal Shelters

#66
post #9

This is a great example of why quantitative research isn't always enough, and this sort of "ethnography" of suicide qualitative research is also important. Some times you have to find out what the ground conditions are that generate the data in order to really understand what's going on & generate insights.

Indeed. Hard to design a double blinded, randomised, placebo controlled trial for suicide prevention.

I was thinking the same for economics. How can you really measure all of the side effects of a government policy? For ex: if the conditions in a marketplace are so bad (for ex: because of a monopoly, or gov-back entrenched businesses, or other useless barriers to entry) that no one ever even tries to start a business, so there's no one ever to complains and nothing to measure.

At most you have some increasingly out-of-date information from before the policy was implemented, when the wider market, technology, access to capital, etc has changed.

Another example is minimum wage laws, it's very difficult to measure what costs there were if the jobs simply weren't created, not simply going declining in existing businesses or measurable marketplace. Combined with the countless other factors which influence hiring and cyclical trends.

I'm not sure what the solution is here but I'm skeptical of a lot of economic research.

Re: Suicide Data Reveal New Intervention Spots, Such as Motels and Animal Shelters

#67
post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I like how you put "prevent tyranny" in quotes, like it's not believable.

It's not. The idea that a rag-tag group of citizens with a stockpile of AR-15s could challenge "tyranny" by fighting a modern US military is laughable.

Which is why both the Iraq, Afghanistan and Vietnam war ended in no time.

Re: Suicide Data Reveal New Intervention Spots, Such as Motels and Animal Shelters

#68
post #12

One point about suicide prevention that I think deserves a little more mention: people who survive an attempt typically do not ever commit suicide [1]. Lifetime survival rates range across studies, but they hover around 90%. Of course, 10% is much higher than the general population rate for lifetime suicide completion rate, which is more like 0.01%, and things are complicated by severity of attempt (you’re more likel…

30% reattempt suicide, which is much higher than the general population.

Re: Suicide Data Reveal New Intervention Spots, Such as Motels and Animal Shelters

#69
post #26
post #24

Tech Lead from YouTube just published this about the FB employee suicide last week: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VbEQriZEfoI Posting because, if allegations are true, it only reinforces my belief that our white collar workplaces have become highly mentally taxing and employees need judgement-free resources provided by employers to deal with them.

The majority of large employers provide Employee Assistance Programs where employees (and family members) can talk to a judgment-free therapist for at least a few sessions. Those therapists are trained in suicide risk, and will report to the authorities if a patient seems likely to attempt suicide soon.

... at the risk of the action being career-ending (or career progress ending).

Re: Suicide Data Reveal New Intervention Spots, Such as Motels and Animal Shelters

#70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where can adults living with this kind of thing, like extreme bullying or psychopathy, get help moving on to better their lives?

I don’t know of any catch all resource. Is this something going on right now, or in your past? If it’s right now, the focus will be on separating yourself from the problem. If it’s the past, then that’s recovery. If you send me an email (my last name at gmail) I could point you to some things that helped me and could apply to your situation.

It is hard to explain everything, but it started when I was a teenager and talked to people at my school about abuse at home. My father hired a team of lawyers after that and they cut a deal with child services which had me shipped off into the Troubled Teen Industry. There I experienced the start of this pattern of abuse and a cult of personality of put downs to me started. It sounds crazy, but I had some authorities there just telling me put downs all the time, like it was a scene from a movie about certain math prodigy at Harvard.

When I was 18 I was taken out of there and then just homeless. By my mid-20s I had a lot of problems with extreme bullying again and unexplainable negativity towards me, but after a short stint with homelessness again I moved to a new city, applied for some jobs and got up to a about 80-90k compensation within a year there. Then I started having problems again with stalking and apparent intent to harm me.

This probably reads as unreal, unbelievable. If I didn't know better and read someone write this on the internet, I'd think it reads like the person has paranoid delusions, mental illness.

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