Discussion Do you talk to people about your suicidal ideation?

[grapevoid]

I am curious
- Have you/do you discuss your feelings or plans about suicide with anyone close to you?
- If you have/do, how do the people around you react?

I have openly discussed my suicidal ideation and with many people close to me in the past, especially when I had just been released from the hospital after a failed attempt. Even while in my outpatient program and being very vulnerable with people close to me most people acted as if it was a joke. So, I am not curious others experience with this.

 

[CravingPeace]

I talked about it with my outpatient therapist and she talked me into a voluntary wellness check, which I then spent 6 days in a psych ward after. I've lost my ability to purchase firearms because of this and lost significant amount of money which is a leading factor of my ideation. I will never talk about it in the real world again

 

[Jorvak]

I Agree love is not just about words but actions! If I had a depressed kid Id do everything in my power to help them

Absolutely! On that note, I've put considerable amount of thought into how i would raise children, and i know i would want to do everything to empower them in every way possible, intellectually, emotionally, psychologically. and with useful skills. I would always try to find ways to support them and analyze the root of the issue to address it directly, if they became depressed. I've considered slightly different approaches to young boys and girls, and LGBTQ children as well. I would teach them to not judge their self-worth according to the arbitrary societal standards we live under, or according to social-cliques, but to develop their own sense of worth, according to ethical values built on a foundation of human dignity and anti-oppression, how much they stand up for and support other people, their interest, their hobbies. and their dignity as a person. Why does it take an autistic person to consider these factors that so many allistic people who are supposedly "more emotionally supportive" so easily miss and never consider?

 

[MatrixPrisoner]

Absolutely. Very matter-of-factly, too. I don't understand why it should be a taboo topic of conversation. Anyone that looks down upon suicide or see's it as bizzarre is either just plain moronic or in pure denial IMO. We live in a world ran by criminals and demons. We're all pitted against each other in it. There are only 2 choices. Become a slave to this system and work to keep the criminals fed or take ourselves out this system. It's all pointless - and in the end, we end up dying anyways.

I'm even more vocal about anti-natalism. I promote this ideology as much as I can whenever I'm around people. I like to get people to consider that having children isn't something you should haphazardly do or feel pressured by society to do. Because the fact of the matter is, 99% of people that procreate are giving birth to a lifetime of problems. I don't think enough prospective parents stop to truly think about this. I get weird reactions and looks sometimes, but IDGAF. I know that deep down they're only uncomfortable and offended because they see some truth to it.

If my preaching can prevent even one child from being born into a lifetime of suffering, I feel like I have done a great service. We need to stop rewarding this toxic and shitty planet with more suffering people to perpetuate this shitty and pointless system, so that a small population of elites can have worker bees to do their bidding..

Abstain...
...use protection
...pull out...
...plan B
...whatever it takes. We need to do ourselves and our unborn children a favor by not procreating.

 

[WanderingTiger]

I don't tell anyone close to me or who I have contact with outside the internet about this for fear of being hospitalised or labelled as an ungrateful lunatic. Online, I tend to vent about it in this forum, and I shared my plans and methods with my only online friend yesterday. Today, he told me that he thinks suicidal people are cowardly and foolish, unable to solve their problems, and that they deserve to be mistreated in hospitals, as if I hadn't even touched on the subject of wanting to die with him. I just feel that he doesn't understand the complexity of it all.

 

[grapevoid]

I don't tell anyone close to me or who I have contact with outside the internet about this for fear of being hospitalised or labelled as an ungrateful lunatic. Online, I tend to vent about it in this forum, and I shared my plans and methods with my only online friend yesterday. Today, he told me that he thinks suicidal people are cowardly and foolish, unable to solve their problems, and that they deserve to be mistreated in hospitals, as if I hadn't even touched on the subject of wanting to die with him. I just feel that he doesn't understand the complexity of it all.

Says the cowardly internet friend who is too weak to have real compassion. I can't stand people.

 

[futurecorpse]

- Have you/do you discuss your feelings or plans about suicide with anyone close to you?
- If you have/do, how do the people around you react?

Yes. My dad, sister, and therapist know I'm suicidal, but they don't know my plan. My dad had a few different responses, so it makes me feel conflicted. My sister said I have to be here and she needs me, but idgaf about her. She had her chance to make things right. And my therapist is saddened to hear me say I'm suicidal, but she said she's not going to try to sway me to stay alive. Nowadays she just sits there during our sessions because she doesn't know what to say when I tell her I want to ctb. She suggested calling for a welfare check and that pissed me off. She's a lovely woman tho so I won't hold it against her

 

[maplebar]

I am curious
- Have you/do you discuss your feelings or plans about suicide with anyone close to you?
- If you have/do, how do the people around you react?

I have openly discussed my suicidal ideation and with many people close to me in the past, especially when I had just been released from the hospital after a failed attempt. Even while in my outpatient program and being very vulnerable with people close to me most people acted as if it was a joke. So, I am not curious others experience with this.

Ive only ever joked about it with friends
And then that results in them probably jokingly encouraging, which sometimes i take to heart
But ive never told anyone my serious plans, i just think about it all the time

 

[manicstreetbeeper]

not now. i don't think other people can or should be trusted for that. i'd only talk to someone now if i were 100 percent certain they'd actually understand and empathize.

 

[WanderingTiger]

Says the cowardly internet friend who is too weak to have real compassion. I can't stand people.

I understand, sometimes it irritates me how people only view life with positivity and lack compassion for the pain of others simply because they have been too privileged to notice all of this. I no longer feel the desire or need to be with people or to be part of this selfish and terrible society; I have the urge to live isolated from everything, here is the only place that truly understands how things really work.

 

[blacksand]

I used to talk to my one remaining friend but he slowly ghosted me. We used to share a lot of this stuff but after being given a nepotism law firm job he likes to think of himself as a corporate rockstar type now and looks down at me.

 

[grapevoid]

Not anymore. I am very impulsive so sometimes I mention it to whoever I might be involved with at the time but I regret doing so as it's difficult for them and only alienates them and makes the dynamic worse.

I have lost a lot of friends in the period when I was vocal about my suicidal thoughts. I keep them to myself now and, when they are too much, I come to this forum. I was institutionalized once and it was one of the worst and most traumatic things to ever happen to me. I promised to myself I'd never discuss it with anyone ever again and I'm going to hold onto that until I'm dead, be it now or several decades down the line. I make exceptions when other people talk to me about their own suicidal ideation/intentions. I know how important it is to know you are safe sharing it with somebody, but I try to be both honest and impersonal about it -- I frame it as something I've been through but not as something I am still experiencing.

I agree with being stuck in a hospital/psych ward being highly traumatic. I have experienced quite a bit of trauma the past 10 years, especially when leaving my abusive ex and still would rate being hospitalized for my mental health in the top 5 most traumatic events of my life. The psychiatrist also deemed me "too combative to accept treatment" which complicated and prolonged my stay. It was genuinely awful.
Just to clarify, I was not too combative to accept treatment, and did accept treatment. I refused their initial attempts at new medications and ketamine therapy because I was still processing my failed attempt and didn't want to change medications or do ketamine therapy in a place I felt so uncomfortable and anxious.

 

[Gamelle]

I talked to my mother about it and I regret it because it just scares her.

 

[_void]

I try to tell my partner but it seems to be met with no understanding and messages like "but you have so much more life to live". I no longer tell my Mum because she would take me to the hospital which is a traumatising place for me to be at. All in all from the people I have talked candidly about it, I always get a hint of they don't want to be talking about it because it's taboo and it just adds to the feeling of isolation. It's one of the reasons I'm grateful I have found this forum.

 

[LostLily]

I scared my friends when I opened up to them about it. It taught me to keep my mouth shut

 

[uta]

I have talked about it a bit with my psychiatrist, who at one appointment asked if I had thought of methods/if I had a gun. I declined to go into detail, and I lied when they asked if I currently think about particular methods. One time they told me to call a hotline or emergency services if I was really close to ctb. I don't think I would ever call, as my thoughts are of a deliberative nature and I don't imagine myself impulsively ending my life on a whim (I've never attempted).

My sense is the psychiatrist imagines the ideation as an unwanted intrusive thought that randomly pops into my head, ruining my day. This is not the case, and I struggle to find a way to talk about it with them, or decide if I should even try to have a conversation.

The way professionals talk about suicidal ideation, while rarely trying to understand why you feel this way, seems about as fallacious and oversimplified as the culturally common perception of depression as a "chemical imbalance". For me, the desire to die is primary, rational from my perspective, and caused/resulted in a major depressive episode rather than stemming from one. The preference to die remained in a later period when I was in remission and at my happiest point in life and intended to have as normal a life as possible, for family's sake if nothing else. Too much has since happened though to maintain that attitude.

 

[maniac116]

Nope. I keep my cards hidden & put on my "Happy Mask". When I go it will well calculated & planned out. Failure is not on the menu.
Even my girlfriend who has lived with me for 10 years hasn't got a clue.

 

[frailcoffee]

No I don't. It's too much work to explain myself and honestly it doesn't matter since everyone I know has their own personal issues that they have to live and deal with. I wouldn't want to burden anyone I know personally with that idea since they do tend to care about everything. It'd be mostly long convoluted rambling I think people would brush off as gibberish

 

[burntthreaded]

I am curious
- Have you/do you discuss your feelings or plans about suicide with anyone close to you?
- If you have/do, how do the people around you react?

I have openly discussed my suicidal ideation and with many people close to me in the past, especially when I had just been released from the hospital after a failed attempt. Even while in my outpatient program and being very vulnerable with people close to me most people acted as if it was a joke. So, I am not curious others experience with this.

i talk to my dad about it. he says he understands and wont be upset if i do, but he hopes i stay.

 

[Giligala]

Never, cuz no one can understand me, specially if I tell somebody, maybe they gonna just think that I'm dramatic, hahaha.

 

[KuriGohan&Kamehameha]

I used to, but I don't anymore for several reasons, the main one being that no one understood and their subsequent reactions/actions were more detrimental to my mental state than if I'd simply said nothing in the first place. Once I found the forum, I now had an outlet to express myself, and so this place acts as a nice stop-gap for me when it comes to being able to let out the things I can't anywhere else.

There is a lot of messaging out there about opening up and talking to someone about how you feel, but there is very little talk about how to listen and empathize with a suicidal person, it's literally all, "How to cajole someone into therapy or hospitalisation even if they don't find either of those things beneficial". Whenever I was growing up, my family talked about suicidal people the way someone would discuss horror movies or true crime documentaries, as if suicidal people were sick and disturbed individuals.

I learned the hard way that being too honest with people would lead to them sending the police to my door, a humiliation ritual that caused multiple people to lose respect for me. My husband's family was so ashamed of me for my thought crime of being suicidal, he was so ashamed of me, the fucking neighbor was ashamed of me, and to top it all off the police and paramedics addressed me as if I was a 5 year old child who lost their senses and had no clue what they were on about, rather than a grown adult who should be spoken to as such. After I had just had an attempt, instead of support, all I got was being talked down to by my husband about how embarrassing I was for being suicidal.

People are too concerned with how they look to others, seeming like they are doing the right things that align with perceived moral values of the groups they want to fit into, than stopping to question if their actions are actually benefitting the other person's interest. From my own experience and reading so many on this site, I would say that what many of us have always needed is love, and compassion, only to be met with sterile, clinical, and fearful responses from others lacking in human touch and kindness.

 

[ForeverCaHa]

I've talked about it with my close friends, but I am fully aware that nothing they say (or anyone else for that matter) will have any influence on my thought process. I know what they're going to say before they even say it, there's only so much you can say to someone in this state of mind really.

I haven't mentioned specific details of my plan, though, since I guess they could actually do something about my decision if they knew what I had in mind (and I wouldn't blame them for trying to dissuade me, of course).

 

[chroniquinn]

I am curious
- Have you/do you discuss your feelings or plans about suicide with anyone close to you?
- If you have/do, how do the people around you react?

I have openly discussed my suicidal ideation and with many people close to me in the past, especially when I had just been released from the hospital after a failed attempt. Even while in my outpatient program and being very vulnerable with people close to me most people acted as if it was a joke. So, I am not curious others experience with this.

Yes, I tried to communicate to my family that I have this suicidal ideation, but nobody ever really took it seriously. Either they laughed it off or they got very mad at me and made it worse, so I learned to keep quiet about it. But my boyfriend knows too and I know that he's very hurt but tries to hide it and help me search for other solutions than death.

 

[FoxSauce]

I try to keep it to myself which I'm good at been doing it since I was a kid.


But I try to express to psychiatrist and dbt therapist , plus she know cuz I have to fill a card that says any suicidal thoughts around the week and I have to fill it out. (Super exhausting)

Anyways but I mostly keep to myself cuz some people don't take me seriously.

 

[Lish]

Only to my one friend and she feels the same.

Literally no one else gives a fuck. Not even my partner.

 

[Gamelle]

I used to, but I don't anymore for several reasons, the main one being that no one understood and their subsequent reactions/actions were more detrimental to my mental state than if I'd simply said nothing in the first place. Once I found the forum, I now had an outlet to express myself, and so this place acts as a nice stop-gap for me when it comes to being able to let out the things I can't anywhere else.

There is a lot of messaging out there about opening up and talking to someone about how you feel, but there is very little talk about how to listen and empathize with a suicidal person, it's literally all, "How to cajole someone into therapy or hospitalisation even if they don't find either of those things beneficial". Whenever I was growing up, my family talked about suicidal people the way someone would discuss horror movies or true crime documentaries, as if suicidal people were sick and disturbed individuals.

I learned the hard way that being too honest with people would lead to them sending the police to my door, a humiliation ritual that caused multiple people to lose respect for me. My husband's family was so ashamed of me for my thought crime of being suicidal, he was so ashamed of me, the fucking neighbor was ashamed of me, and to top it all off the police and paramedics addressed me as if I was a 5 year old child who lost their senses and had no clue what they were on about, rather than a grown adult who should be spoken to as such. After I had just had an attempt, instead of support, all I got was being talked down to by my husband about how embarrassing I was for being suicidal.

People are too concerned with how they look to others, seeming like they are doing the right things that align with perceived moral values of the groups they want to fit into, than stopping to question if their actions are actually benefitting the other person's interest. From my own experience and reading so many on this site, I would say that what many of us have always needed is love, and compassion, only to be met with sterile, clinical, and fearful responses from others lacking in human touch and kindness.

It's crazy how normalized it is to treat suicidal people as children. Medical professionals insist that we are not rational because a suicidal person can't be rational. We can be functioning adults, married, careers, homes, and function day-to-day just like everyone else, but because we want to kill ourselves, suddenly we have less agency than a toddler. It is bizarre, and it is so clearly not true. But people have to tell themselves suicidal people are irrational so they can convince themselves that locking us in mental hospitals or taking away any options for painless death is "for our own good."

 

[happier than ever]

ive told only one person, the rest ive told them that i have an irrational fear that im going to die soon... im just trying to prepare them subtlely since i plan to ctb soon

 

[grapevoid]

Only to my one friend and she feels the same.

Literally no one else gives a fuck. Not even my partner.

I feel this way too. Or that maybe they just don't think I'm serious. I feel guilty even because I feel that once I'm gone they will regret their actions.

 

[la-vie-c-harrr]

I am curious
- Have you/do you discuss your feelings or plans about suicide with anyone close to you?
- If you have/do, how do the people around you react?

I have openly discussed my suicidal ideation and with many people close to me in the past, especially when I had just been released from the hospital after a failed attempt. Even while in my outpatient program and being very vulnerable with people close to me most people acted as if it was a joke. So, I am not curious others experience with this.

no because talking about it might give the impression that what you really want is help and not to do it because someone who really wants to do it wouldn't talk about it

 

[anonymouswebuser]

I am curious
- Have you/do you discuss your feelings or plans about suicide with anyone close to you?
- If you have/do, how do the people around you react?

I have openly discussed my suicidal ideation and with many people close to me in the past, especially when I had just been released from the hospital after a failed attempt. Even while in my outpatient program and being very vulnerable with people close to me most people acted as if it was a joke. So, I am not curious others experience with this.

Yes, I make - half jokes - regarding it because it's my way of coping.

I've gotten 3 different reactions—
1. Concern: A specific person start showing concern ever since I joked about it once, but then when I started getting serious about that discussion. Guess what? they stopped replying! (⁠•⁠‿⁠•⁠)

2. Laughter: Not everyone takes it seriously, everyone who has met me said they'd never expect a person like me would do something like that, but oh well

3. Turning a blind eye: Ignoring the joke, switching the topic quickly or pretending to have not heard me

 

[cassie]

yes, i will sometimes mention it - i make it a point to introduce the fact that im depressed quite early on, nowadays - i figured it makes interactions easier.
and it sorta does. sometimes. either way, since being suicidal is a common occurence among the depressed, i dont see why i should keep it hidden.
ofc i dont trust everyone with this information, because for alot of people its an outlandish line of feeling/thought. i wouldnt share concrete plans, however, if i were to had some.