The undiscovered country: Can suicide be predicted?

They'd push it even sooner if no one they cared about depended on them.

A lot of people stay alive simply out of a sense of responsibility towards others.

And yet polygraphs are known to be unreliable, to the point that they are generally not admissible in court. It would probably be better marketing if they don't imply that their product is comparable to an qn existing tech that is unreliable.

I think we should be really careful about how we think & talk about this.

There are a few situations (like psychotic breaks) where people fully believe delusions that, in a short time, they will reject. We can cleanly call those experiences "irrational."

On the other hand, people who experience long term depression literally experience the world differently in a way that we frequently cannot 'correct'[1]. Those people are not irrationally convinced that the world is hard to be in - they have brains for which things feel worse than for neurotypical brains. We can agree on all objectively measurable qualities of the world and their experience of that world will still be subjectively and consistently worse.

The conversations from the right-to-die movement can be useful here, as chronic pain and disease offer a lens through which to understand. We have all experienced physical pain, but we have not all experienced serious depression.

All I mean to say is that in the same way that someone with any chronic illness should have some choice in when and how they die, people who have chronic mental conditions should have the same right. We do not want to make the mistake of thinking that a person in a more complicated situation is compromised in some way - just that their world is more complex and we should take care to attend to the specifics of it.

[1] It's not clear what way of seeing the world is 'right' but I will use correct here even with its implication that neurotypical people live in the real world.

A 2001 University of Houston study of survivors of near lethal attempts showed that 70% of them had only decided to do it an hour or less before the attempt, and 24 percent had only spent 5 minutes before the attempt.

If when attempting it, they discover that their chosen method won't work for some reason, many will just give up on killing themselves rather than looking for an alternative measure.

This has been reliably seen many times. If a change is made such that one suicide method becomes unfeasible, the overall attempt rate drops. If one were committed to offing oneself it is almost impossible to stop them, as there are countless ways to do it. But the statistics are very clear that if some method is removed, alternatives are not always used.

The British had an issue with people killing themselves with oven fumes, back when the ovens used coal gas which created a lot of carbon monoxide, with this accounting for about 50% of suicide deaths. When things were changed to use natural gas where this approach does not work, suicides dropped by 30%. Obviously while that means a portion ending up using some other method, many others simply never killed themselves.

Of 515 people prevented by police from jumping off the Golden Gate Bridge between 1937 and 1971, by the end of the 70s only 6% of them had committed suicide by other means.

Weirdly even some of the non-impulsive cases where people had planned an attempt for days or weeks just give up if their plan is foiled, rather than coming up with some alternative method.

Now obviously not everybody is like this. Some people will continue to try over and over until they succeed. But the numbers suggest that those are very much a minority.