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Daddy isn’t coming back

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Re: Daddy isn’t coming back

#241

Post by c22 »

jkljkljkl1 wrote: post #235
anm89 wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for the perspective. I have never experienced either directly so at best I'm speculating although I've been around many people who have been through both. My basis for making that comment is that at least ostensibly you get due process in the legal system. Hope you came out the other side in a good place.

Involuntary commitment from mental health is a min. 72 hours here, but I think you can be in and out of a drunk tank faster than that, which is usually just a few hours to sober up. I could see a bail hearing happening quick enough that you get in and out before 72 hours, but I don't know how common that is.

It's true that you'll be stuck in the mental hospital for at least a week (those are 72 business hours). I couldn't afford bail, though, so I was stuck in jail for 3 months[0]. There were plenty of other inmates there in similar situations. YMMV.

[0] That's how long it took for me to get a court date at which point I was released with time served (2 weeks). Getting out of the mental hospital never even required a lawyer (though I'd still recommend retaining one if you're ever in this situation).

Re: Daddy isn’t coming back

#242

Post by phailhaus »

aerovistae wrote: post #35

Not a comment on the story itself, but rather on the postscript which follows it: > If you are struggling to cope or have been affected by anything in this story, please contact the Samaritans in the UK at 116 123 or jo@samaritans.org. In the US, the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline is 1-800-273-8255. More information at mind.org.uk, samaritans.org and save.org Years ago, unhappy but not suicidal, I decided to ca…

So uh...you made one call to a suicide hotline, admitted that you were not suicidal, and you think that experience is enough to assert that the service is completely useless for those that are suicidal?

Re: Daddy isn’t coming back

#243

Post by huitzitziltzin »

s1artibartfast wrote: post #217
huitzitziltzin wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s not a false statement. You are correct that saving lives in this way doesn’t put money in anyone’s pocket. Nor can the value generated be taxed. However, it generates $50 billion relative to the actual state of the world in which there is a cost that large due to suicides.

>However, it generates $50 billion relative to the actual state of the world in which there is a cost that large due to suicides. What does that mean? What if I say a life is worth 1 trillion dollars, of 1 google dollars? does that mean that if I save a life the world is 1 trillion dollars richer?

It would mean that if you decided a life was worth a trillion dollars.

This is intrinsically a very hard question to answer. Fortunately there are ways to make better estimates for that number than by guessing.

The way people behave when buying either insurance products, products which enhance their safety (in particular: reduce the risk of mortality) are informative about these implicit valuations.

There is a large literature in economics about this (Kip Viscusi at Vanderbilt has an accessible book about the topic, since he has written many of these papers) and of course the EPA and other government agencies have estimates as well.

Re: Daddy isn’t coming back

#244

Post by dragonwriter »

s1artibartfast wrote: post #217
huitzitziltzin wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s not a false statement. You are correct that saving lives in this way doesn’t put money in anyone’s pocket. Nor can the value generated be taxed. However, it generates $50 billion relative to the actual state of the world in which there is a cost that large due to suicides.

>However, it generates $50 billion relative to the actual state of the world in which there is a cost that large due to suicides. What does that mean? What if I say a life is worth 1 trillion dollars, of 1 google dollars? does that mean that if I save a life the world is 1 trillion dollars richer?

> 1 google dollars

Unless this is a fancy way of saying “an amount of money equal to the value of the most well-known unit of Alphabet”, you probably mean “1 googol dollars”.

Re: Daddy isn’t coming back

#245

Post by xwdv »

akerl_ wrote: post #195
xwdv wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Being dead is still a better choice than being trapped in that system and carrying the stigma your whole life IMO. It becomes a permanent problem that you cannot escape.

It seems pretty tautologically impossible for being “trapped in that system” to be a more permanent problem than death.

A problem can follow a person all the way up until the day they die. Death is sometimes the only true escape.

Re: Daddy isn’t coming back

#246

Post by jacquesm »

hn8788 wrote: post #231
babyshake wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Genuinely curious about this - if you call one of these numbers and say you are thinking of self harm but you are not actually going to hurt yourself and you do not want them to call whomever to your home are they likely to do it anyways?

A friend's husband called one of the suicide lines and he wasn't committed or visited by the police, so it's not a 100% chance. I don't know the details of what the husband talked about, but it may have been because it wasn't a recurring problem. He'd just had an especially awful time at work for a few weeks, and eventually had a breakdown and called a hotline. He quit his job a couple of days later and has been fine…

Companies that drive people to suicide are really something else. I hope he showed his colleagues that there is a way out.

Re: Daddy isn’t coming back

#247

Post by cloudedcordial »

A friend's acquintance has been mentally ill for the last 10 years. They lost their spouse, their job, their car ... everything! They've been gradually increasingly incoherent in their speech over time. They've been resisting treatments.

We are not doctors and won't armchair diagnose them, but we figured out something was wrong. We called a hotline for mental health services trying to see how non-family could help. The counsellor from the hotline said that the best we could do was to convince them that they had to seek help. Since they're an adult, we should not put them in a mental health facility forcefully.

The family had put them in a mental health facility but they escaped. They still thought that they did nothing wrong.

We ran out of ideas on how to help them. They've been living on the streets. We feel helpless.

Re: Daddy isn’t coming back

#248

Post by 1MachineElf »

cloudedcordial wrote: post #247

A friend's acquintance has been mentally ill for the last 10 years. They lost their spouse, their job, their car ... everything! They've been gradually increasingly incoherent in their speech over time. They've been resisting treatments. We are not doctors and won't armchair diagnose them, but we figured out something was wrong. We called a hotline for mental health services trying to see how non-family could help. T…

Have you tried attaining power of attorney?

Re: Daddy isn’t coming back

#249

Post by robocat »

R0b0t1 wrote: post #196
Invictus0 wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or perhaps the most suicidal people are more likely to be committed? Causation seems very hard to show here.

If incidence of suicidal ideation goes up with number of involuntary holds then it means that psych facilities are not treating the problem. That is enough: that they are provably not treating it. First do no harm means you have to be causing good; ambivalence is treated as likely harm because it is invasive.

You mention a correlation, and then you presume cause and effect. An alternative is that the people most likely to commit suicide are more likely to be treated with multiple involuntary holds.

If psych facilities prevent suicides 50% of the time in the long term, the correlation exists for the 50% where they were unsuccessful. Psych facilities could be wildly successful, and still suicides would be more common with multiple admittances to the facilities.

I’m not saying you are wrong, but I am asking you to consider you could be wrong, before wading into such a dangerous area.

That said, I personally think calling mental health services is only for true emergencies: they are highly toxic environments where a bunch of loonies are locked up together and the nurses and doctors can also be toxic as hell. Putting an 18 year old girl under the power of a 40 year old male psychologist who demands obeisance is deeply sickening. She told me she had been previously committed “for her own safety” (I guess manic sexual behaviour), and she said she was raped while in the facility. Sometimes someone is mental as fuck and committing someone to the psych ward is necessary, but I personally would try all other avenues I could safely do so, even at risk to myself. It is a nasty situation and there usually is lots of downside risks regardless of choices made.

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