manic_depressive13 said:
It seems like at least the OP has things well in hand now, so let's do this.
1) That "industry" you're talking about has helped millions of people, myself included. You have helped noone. Guess who I think is more worthy of being listened to? If you're determined to treat the medical profession as an enemy and assume that, despite apparently having nothing to lose you know better than the huge number of people who spend their lives helping people like you, then it's no wonder nothing has ever improved for you.
2) If someone confides in you that they are at risk, be it from suicide or abuse or any other factor but doesn't want you to tell anyone about it, there is a clear procedure which everyone who works with vulnerable people, be it children or the mentally ill, knows by heart. Firstly, you attempt to convince the person to come forward and seek help of their own accord. If that fails, you explain clearly that you cannot keep this information secret because the potential consequences for them are too great. If they still won't come forward with you, then you tell someone. At no point do you lie and claim that you will keep their secret. You are entirely honest with that person at all times.
So no, there are ways to deal with the situation which are neither betraying someone's trust or ignoring very clear warning signs.
3) For someone who claims to have depression, you seem to have very little understanding of what it actually is.
People get depressed all the time. Normally, it is linked to clear environmental factors such as bereavement, unemployment, illness, social and relationship problems, bullying, whatever. The feelings people have in these situations are grounded in by real events and therefore temporary. As the person leaves the situation or as time passes from a traumatic event, someone's mood will generally improve again. If their mood does not improve, then they have become clinically depressed.
Clinical depression is a mood disorder. Because of neurological problems and/or learned thinking patterns which result in negative emotions, a person with clinical depression feels sad regardless of what happens to them. It is nothing to do with their environment, because even if the environment improves or isn't that bad to begin with a clinically depressed person does not find any pleasure in it. At this point, the only way for the person to feel better is to take medication and/or to find some way to challenge the recurring thought processes which lead to a depressed response.
So either suicide is a response to a situation which is usually
temporary (in fact both are often temporary, even clinical depression is treatable), or it is caused by by neurological or psychological problems which distort the person's mood. The only reason why a person might "reasonably" want to kill themselves is if there is genuinely no chance of their situation ever improving, such as having a terminal illness or a serious disability which reduces quality of life.
4) There is no painless and reliable way to end your own life short of getting a doctor to do it for you. However, contrary to your strange assessment cutting your wrists is actually pretty quick and easy if anyone was ever genuinely determined to do it. Hence, the first thing anyone would do if they were trying to make a place safe for a suicidal person is to hide any sharp objects.
What do you honestly think is a better option here? Do you imagine that dying of liver failure hurts less than bleeding out? Have you ever seen the face of someone who has died of liver failure?
All suicide prevention is meant to do, and all it does do is to stop someone from killing themselves during the few hours they might want to do so. Fuck, even if you go into a psychiatric hospital on suicide watch they'll release you within 24 hours and if you wanted to you could go straight out and jump off a bridge. The reason for this is that the
need to kill yourself, not just the ability to think about it or fantasize about it, or to decide to do it at some point in the future, is almost always an extremely
temporary feeling. It is not the result of a rational choice, it is the product of momentary desperation.
If you genuinely, rationally wanted to kill yourself, you could so in a couple of minutes. You wouldn't even need to tell anyone at all, in fact doing so would just hurt your chances of success. Any one of us could snap our fingers right now, decide to do it and probably manage it if we genuinely wanted to and had no trace of doubt or hesitation. But you know what, that pretty much
never happens. Very few people who attempt to kill themselves are doing so because they have a terminal illness or because their situation is genuinely unlikely to improve. They are doing so because they are momentarily desperate.
