I don’t think you realize how often depressed people say they will but don’t commit suicide, and also being able to know when is quite remarkable - I think this study is pretty interesting, and not as obvious as you think it is.

Also, "most." Presumably most attempters were not participating in the study's surveys, so it would be impossible for the study to predict for them.

> The strongest and most consistent predictors of next-week SA included within-study history of SREs (from adult lasso regression: OR = 1.47) and self-reported agitation (OR = 1.11), whereas odds of next-week SA were decreased for surveys submitted on weekends (OR = 0.87) and in the context of feelings that one could resist suicidal urges (OR = 0.88–0.96).

It seems a little silly, that suicide-relared events are well predicted by people announcing their nearness to suicide. It's useful in the sense that it shows that people, at least those people who consented to being monitored, which is a major confounder, are announcing their intent to anyone who is listening.

Uh, sounds like a prediction to me? It’s not “not a prediction” just because the prediction is not made on a certain type of data.

> If we can make sure people don’t grow up believing that suicide is even a way to cope with what has happened to them, we could significantly reduce the number of suicides.

The fact that there is a plan B (suicide) keeps me going.

I was actively (almost daily) considering suicide around ages 13-16. I made a decision to postpone it every day I thought of it because I believed I had seen too little of life by that point to make a decision to end it. But it being available as an option made things easier. There was a “backup plan” and I could always use it, which made it possible to endure another day.

I’m in my 30s today. I have used the same strategy in some other complicated life situations since my teenage years, although only a few times and very briefly. Knowing that you can just end it and that it’s available to you not just today, but also tomorrow and the day after that, is so unbelievably useful in my opinion that I’d personally like to see it normalized, rather than the opposite.

For example, when I was in enormous physical pain, my thinking was: “If there are no other options left, I can always just end it. But there are other options, so let’s try those first.” Reminding myself that I am working on solutions, and that if I run out of them, there is still one final option, took all the edge off the pain. It lost its power over me. I was fully in control of how this issue was going to be resolved. And it takes the edge off suicide itself - it’s just one of the solutions, nothing special. Compared to other solutions it has one terrible drawback: you can’t try any of the other solutions once you’ve tried this one.

You're so close to getting it.

If you could somehow shelter people from the idea of ending it, you'd have created the torment nexus. People who do so usually do it because they see negative things coming up and they're too tired to continue. What you're advocating for is everyone to run an endless marathon where if you fall behind or stop, you'd get endlessly whipped to continue no matter how much your wounds are bleeding from it.

Good. Your faith will be tested.

Hey mate, I'm glad you could write this, hopefully the few messages of support you got help.

If I had one advice, it would be to find someone who relates to how you feel, because being able to talk about it to someone who's been/is there is the one thing that really helps, in my experience. I don't know where, a friend, a suicide support group, a men's group, but being able to talk about these feelings and be really understood does help.

In the meantime, try just to be around people when it's hardest.

Sorry to not have anything better to offer. Hope you keep going, brother.

Yeah, that's the truth. Identifying someone is suicidal really kinda means very little. What are they going to do, lock you in a room and take away the little freedom you have to choose? Sure, that's helpful. Gonna be extra great when they eventually let you out and you don't have a house or job to go back to.

And helping someone who is suicidal improve their life is such an enormous hardship that the little we currently offer to help with it (therapy) is so weak it's insane. No, talking to this person for 30 minutes and telling me little mental tricks to deal with things isn't going to save me. Pills do better but still are pretty weak.

Truth is, the real solution is to FIX THE PROBLEM. Society should help suicidal people by addressing the life crisis that causes them to be suicidal. Anything short of that is either worthless or requires a full time live-in caretaker.

Hey sorry to hear about this. I see a lot of your comments and enjoy them.

I didn't understand any of this until I had a relationship with someone that had suicidal thoughts from time to time.

This echoes much of what she described - constant pain is hard, and suicide offers immediate relief.

It's an experience of reality that's very hard to understand for anyone who hasn't been close to it.

@sillysaurusx thank you for sharing your experience so clearly. Best of luck

Hello Shawn!

I have been "hear"ing people out, without trying to "help", for over two decades.

In case you wish to talk to me, please mail me: Gmail sigma.ml.

Hug.

That sounds awful - sometimes pain is unbearable, and moreso because other people are so blind to it.

And the fear of things being worse if I try but fail to end it..

Often times, for me, it feels like surviving more than living let alone thriving.

I miss having good pain free uninterrupted full nights sleep.

What you feel is valid. And going through it in a new place, with no local support, makes it that much harder. I think most people would feel the same pain you feel, if they were in your shoes. I think most people would want someone to listen/care, too. But the burden of sitting with what you're going through is too much/too heavy, so people reflexively protect themselves from really seeing it..

It sucks, and I'm sorry.

Sometimes animals make better companions than humans through thick and thin... fostering comes to mind as a possible productive distraction from the pain, if that's something you might be compatible with. Though you didn't ask for advice (sorry)

I hear you, and I've been in similar places.

I don't know you, but I would encourage you talk to a professional about these thoughts as soon as possible. This isn't a judgment, not trying to cut you out - it's just been helpful to me personally. Therapy is really just one more person to hear you, commiserate, and help process life being as hard as it is.

I’m having a time parsing your comment: you’d consider suicide because you are far away from the people you love? (i.e. you have something to look forward to)

The times I have felt suicidal were when I had nothing to look forward to. Having a little person to care about that I miss so much to break down crying just thinking about them is motive enough to go through hell twice just to reunite with them.

Life is hard and I’m sorry you’re going through this. <3 Have you tried talking to someone professionally?

If you’re feeling down, go listen to music on Sixth Street, head to New Orleans or camp out at Enchanted Rock

About 30% of survivors try again and ~7% eventually succeed according to https://hsph.harvard.edu/research/means-matter/means-matter-... , "Nine out of ten people who attempt suicide and survive will not go on to die by suicide at a later date. This has been well-established in the suicidology literature. A literature review (Owens 2002) summarized 90 studies that have followed over time people who have made suicide attempts that resulted in medical care. Approximately 7% (range: 5-11%) of attempters eventually died by suicide, approximately 23% reattempted non-fatally, and 70% had no further attempts."

I believe this, and it mirrors what I have heard from suicide attempt survivors in my personal life too.

I do wonder what the story would be if we could somehow ask the people who didn't survive. Likely a purely philosophical question with no answer, but I wonder how many of the people who do end their own lives don't regret it at all.

Most likely the dead are not capable of regret, but if there is some manner of afterlife where people can contemplate their actions, I do wonder how many of them would regret their suicides

Only the ones you could ask afterwards;) This is propaganda pretending that suicide is an impulsive decision. That's a category error because in many cases, it is not.

If there was more focus on screening for impulsive thoughts and disrupting people who suddenly change behaviour, modern suicide prevention would do much better. The people who really want to die do not engage with therapy or mental health services because they know they'll be having their freedom taken away if they mention their thoughts to anyone else. That's why many of these stories go like "oh he looked so happy! no one could have known" - yeah because he was smart enough not to say anything;)

It’s very much an embodiment of the law that says to monitor a system is to interfere with it; it would be very hard to say they “predicted” general suicide attempts vs they set up a scenario that allowed them to nudge people into such actions given everything.

Why do you say that - are you referencing something specific or just a point about his framing of existence? I just finished "a short history of decay"

I'd like to understand this quip better as well

Thank you for opening my horizons :)

Yes it sounds like people came in at high risk of suicide and then they gave them an app that surveyed them and would predict they were going to commit suicide. Given they were at high risk for suicide attempts, how does this compare to just predicting the people would always try to commit suicide in the following week?

I also wonder if having to answer this daily annoying survey a actually make you more wanting to kill yourself...

That is incredibly dismissive to people undergoing something that is causing them to temporarily have these thoughts and need intervention