Hey folks. It's me, VubDapple. I'm a (not so active but still present) mod for this community and also a mental health professional. Recently there was some upset at this young community's rule about posts concerning suicide. I thought I'd offer a few thoughts about suicide and where things seem to stand right now. Sorry for the delay in my response; things have been rather busy in my life.

Suicide is a super frightening topic for many people - with good reason. As such, it is difficult to figure out how to manage discussion of suicide in a public and anonymous volunteer forum so that everyone's needs are best met. A few issues come to mind that have to do with such balancing of needs:

1. How to balance the needs of people who want to discuss their suicidal thoughts against the needs of other people who would be triggered by reading it and would really like to avoid it? Suicidal ideation is really common within groups of people who self-identify as having mental health issues, so on the one hand it is reasonable to discuss it. On the other hand, the very nature of the topic feels dangerous to many, sometimes because it might trigger one's own suicidal thoughts and at other times because there is concern that if not handled properly any discussion could make the issue worse rather than better.

2. How to know what the risk is that someone who is suicidal might actually attempt suicide? Many people who are suicidal are not in imminent danger, but some really are. Because this judgement is difficult to make, and because no one here including moderators is able to take on an actual care-giving clinical role, it is reasonable for us to treat all suicidal discussion as potentially dangerous.

3. How to best care for a suicidal person? This community is simply not able to provide any actual suicide prevention service! There is nothing like /r/suicidewatch here at this time! The community is not staffed to care for an acutely suicidal person.

The recent rule adjustment (Rule #4) has been made to try to strike a balance between the competing needs of community members. Basically, it's okay to acknowledge the existence of suicidal thoughts or thoughts relating to self-harm but we want to discourage extended discussion of such topics, precisely because no one here is able to take on an extended care-giving role in the manner a professional caregiver would and because there is a reasonable chance or at least reasonable concern that extended discussion might make things worse than they already are. The best advice that can be given at this time would be to seek professional mental health care.

I can shed some light on how to know when suicidal thoughts are considered acutely and immediately dangerous and when they are not by providing the following psycho-educational information.

Mental health professionals divided the universe of suicidal thoughts into "active" and "passive" categories. I like to offer the metaphor of a "poison flower" to help people recognize how these categories work.

Suicidal thoughts are a developmental process that starts small and grows to become a threat. Think of a flower seedling - it is very small at first - just a shoot coming out of the soil. As it grows it develops tiny leaves and the stem gets larger, the leaves get larger, etc. in a developmental process. Eventually a bud forms, that bud opens and then we have a flower. The universe of passive suicidal ideation is just like this flower during its developmental phase eg., before the flower blooms. The universe of active suicidal ideation is like the flower after it has bloomed. Active suicidality is much more dangerous than passive suicidal ideation.

Passive ideation usually starts with a feeling of overwhelm; a sense that a person simply does not have what it will take to manage the situation they find themselves in. As it grows, the passively suicidal person becomes aware of the thought that they might be better off dead. Often this thought is frightening at first; the people who experience it do not want it there and see it as a sign that they aren't well. A further development of the suicidal process but still passive suicidality occurs when a person finds themselves fantasizing about how they might end their life. The thoughts may still be unwanted and at this phase of the developmental process there can be a sense of a growing struggle between the thoughts of dying and the desire to push those thoughts away. An even further development might occur when a person starts taking seriously the idea that they might actually kill themselves. At this late stage of passive suicidal ideation there may still not be what we call intent, but nevertheless the suicidal person may start researching how they would end their life.

The turning point between passive and active suicidality comes when three criteria are met: 1) there is intent to harm one's self, 2) there is a plan for how the person will harm themselves, and 3) the person has access to the means to harm themselves. The term intent means that the person has come to regard the idea of suicide as something they will carry out. The term plan means only that the person has picked a method for how they will die. You don't need to have a "good" plan (eg., one likely to be lethal) in order for it to count that you have a plan; any plan will do. Finally having access to the means for committing suicide means having access to the tools and materials that the person would use to end their life. When all three of these criteria are met, we mental health professionals consider the person to be actively suicidal. When the criteria are not all met then we consider people to be more passively suicidal.

Suicidal ideation is not a one-way process. People can move from not-suicidal to passively suicidal and then later to actively suicidal, but it is also true that actively suicidal people can exit their active suicidal status back usually to passively suicidal status, and then even later become not suicidal again. It's important to keep this in mind because of what some call the "suicidal trance" eg., the tendency, as a person becomes more and more actively suicidal, to believe that suicide is the only reasonable response to what appears to that person at the moment to be an endless and entirely hopeless set of life problems from which suicide is the only escape. Most of the time it isn't true that the person's life problems are actually endlessly hopeless, but it does tend to feel that way when you're in it.

There is no hard and fast rule for assessing danger here, but the general idea is that passive suicidality is less acutely dangerous than active suicidality; mostly because with active suicidality by definition there is intent to die and the person's energies are marshaled in the direction of finding a way to make that happen in a manner that is simply not the case when a person is more passively suicidal. Passive suicidality is dangerous in that it may become active later on, but most of the time when someone is passively suicidal they are not going to go home and kill themselves any time soon. Active suicidality is a crisis. The actively suicidal person needs help and they need it as quickly as it can be found. A good way to gain that help if there is no other resource around would be to go to a hospital emergency room and tell the staff there that you are actively suicidal. Such action might help best in the short term because at least in the USA (where I am located) the healthcare system is broken and there easily might not be follow up care provided which would be needed, but it might be better than nothing.

What sort of care does a suicidal person benefit from? If you know of someone who is suicidal and the right solution is not immediate hospitalization to contain a crisis that will unfold very very shortly if urgent measures are not taken, then what is the right solution? It used to be the case that mental health professionals were trained to ask suicidal people to "sign a no-suicide contract" whether actually or metaphorically. It turns out that this doesn't help much. These days, in addition to whatever therapy they may provide mental health professionals are trained to help passively suicidal clients by helping them complete a Suicide Safety Plan.

The Suicide Safety Plan is simply a list of resources that the suicidal person can think about when they are tempted by the possibility of harming themselves. It is designed to help a suicidal person to maintain perspective about their larger situation even as the "suicidal trance" beckons them to die, and to remind the suicidal person of the techniques they can use or the resources they can call upon if they are feeling especially tempted.

Anyone can make a Suicide Safety Plan by answering the following questions:

1. What are the warning signs in your behavior that signal that you are becoming increasingly suicidal?

2. What are the ways you have available to calm or sooth yourself that might lessen your need to suicide?

3. What can you do to make the environment safer for you (like getting rid of the means of harming yourself)?

4. What are reasons for living? Often this one boils down to "Who would be harmed if you were to die?"

5. Who in your personal life can you talk to about how bad things are?

6. Who are the healthcare professionals you can call on if things get really bad?

I know what you might be thinking! A lot of people looking at these questions have told me that they can't see it coming, they don't know how to sooth themselves, there are no valid reasons for living, they have no friends or people who care about them and that they can't access healthcare because it is too expensive (which is often true in the profit-obsessed USA unfortunately). Even so, it is worth trying to engage with these questions so as to write out methods and names and resources as well as you can. Even a little bit of hope and a little bit of planning in advance can become critical in a crisis, making the difference between life and death.

A final word about reasons for living. Many times suicidal people have told me that even though they have children or loved ones, that their children will be better off without them alive. Such is the warping influence of the suicidal trance which commonly argues that the suicidal person is and can only be a burden and that children or loved ones will be better off without them. This simply isn't true. Children get FUCKED UP when their parents commit suicide. Loved ones get FUCKED UP when their loved ones commit suicide. Particularly for children who lose their parents to suicide, the effect is to traumatize them rather permanently for the rest of their lives. I have seen it up close and personal. Nothing I might say can make the influence of the suicidal trance less strong, but at least hear me in that this part of what that trance says is a lie. Nothing good comes of suicide except maybe that your own personal pain is discharged. The others around you will suffer. If you don't want to contribute to the suffering of others, please consider looking for another way. That other way might be very hard to find or very expensive to access, but when it is life or death, it's a good investment to make.

General Suicide Information

https://www.cdc.gov/suicide/index.html

Suicide Helplines In the USA: call or text 988

https://findahelpline.com/i/iasp

https://blog.opencounseling.com/suicide-hotlines/

Suicide Safety Planning:

https://www.verywellmind.com/suicide-safety-plan-1067524

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-recovery-coach/202306/how-to-develop-a-safety-plan-to-manage-a-suicidal-crisis

I just lost my job and its been months of endless searching. I feel like the interviews go well but I still don't have anything. I am giving up all my hobbies and pretty much everything me from killing myself and I still cannot find anything. I am close to losing my apartment and everyday is a nightmare. I am starting to self harm I cannot afford to get help I can't even eat full meals anymore and I do not know what to do.

The mood matrix (ie the Microsoft logo). A four quadrant grid to plot energy and pleasantness. Some charts have 100 emotions, others have 4. You can find one online, here are some example (https://transkatgirl.github.io/TheMoodMeter/), https://duckduckgo.com/?q=mood+matrix+chart+meter+-app&t=ffab&iar=images.

Description Blue: Low energy, low pleasantness. This is where depression sits.

Red: High energy, low pleasantness. This is where anger goes.

Yellow: High energy, high pleasant. Festive.

Green: Low energy, high pleasant. Serene, content, calm.

Maybe you know this already. Maybe you also know that you can try to pair your activities with your mood. So why am I sharing? It's a prompt. I've heard of this before, never bothered to try it or never did it successfully. It's worth trying if you're struggling right now and have to work.

My week has been rough, mental health dropped of a cliff after being solid for several weeks. Monday, the usual, 'I can't do this right now' feelings. I'd usually grind through the day, nap with my phone on alert, take a long lunch, stop early and tell myself I'd catch up later when I'm feeling better. Mental health days right? Meanwhile I'm falling behind, having less than positive interactions with coworkers, making mistakes, and just generally making my life worse.

I'll try the mood chart thing, this time I have an LLM to help me think because I'm an idiot.

I only sort of want the day off, but I realize I might be on this roller coaster for a while. What can I actually do today?

1. Red Zone (Angry, Frustrated, Overwhelmed)

• Urgent, high-energy tasks: clearing backlogs, problem-solving, making quick decisions
• Use the frustration energy to push through stuck problems
• Physical tasks: organizing, rearranging, building things.
• Brainstorming: Pull out some paper, a web tool, or whiteboard and come up with ideas and plans. Explore solutions later if that's better.
• Avoid talking to people, mute notifications

2. Yellow Zone (Anxious, Excited)

• Creative work: Channel that restless energy into being creative
• Wrap up projects, put a bow on it and then start something else that sounds fun
• Planning: Outline projects, create to-do lists, or schedule future work.
• Bring donuts

3. Green Zone (Calm, Focused, Happy)

• Deep-focus work: Tackle complex projects, research, writing, meticulous and challenging activities, analysis
• Collaborative tasks: Team meetings, discussions, problem-solving with others.
• Socializing with colleagues, go out for lunch, call someone, bring donuts for people
• Planning. I think planning goes everywhere except blue.

4. Blue Zone (Tired, Sad, Low Energy)

• Low-energy tasks: Organizing files, deleting things, sorting documents, or simple administrative work, simple things, dull tasks that you've been putting off
• Research: Tasks that require reading, learning, or reviewing information at a comfortable pace. Get cozy.
• Planning: review work you've done recently

It's helping me get through this wave. Monday and Tuesday have been better than I expected, I've been productive and I don't feel worse.

On one hand I sort of dislike doing this because it's a reminder of my failings, but on the other hand I am not sure what do either

A major pillar of support has decided to cut ties with me and it not something I can hold it against them as they have their own lives and when I recently decided to share my troubles it became too hard to deal with on account that they couldn't help me and fear that they are only making things worse.

My latest round of issues has been identifying with the long standing issue of loneliness. It is something that I have sat on and thought about recently as a root of a lot of my issues. I am isolated with feelings I am sure go back as far as childhood. I don't know how to maintain friendships, I have developed unhealthy habits that suppress who I am and overwhelm people with all the stored up misery when they get close.

It scares people away and because of it I have to force myself to suppress the person I am, which has and continues to lead to a feedback loop which further perpetuates the cycle.

I feel I only have one long standing bond left and even then I am careful to control what I say and do and avoid contact in an attempt to perserve it.

I used to be able to communicate with some people who I shared a common interest with over discord but cannot do it now as the hand me down pc I received after my old pc broke has trouble with real-time communication as the audio is heavily distorted and delayed

I feel alone, isolated, helpless, worthless.... insert self depreciating adjective.... and I stuck in this really bad mindset that has me feeling trapped, literally and figuratively

I cannot afford professional help and when I tried in the past to get help through the local clinic I became disenfrachised by the treatment I received as it felt that I was a "functional" case that drug use was enough to treat (mentioned conditions Anxiety, Depression and ADHD with an an off-hand remark of possible Aspergers, but never received an official prognosis, much less a diagnosis) - with them not really giving me any answers or support - other local lines were just as useless as they are both made me aware of how overworked they are and provide far too general advice to issues which results in me reserving myself and not addressing problems knowing that they aren't really listening.

It feels like because I am not a stark raving lunatic that it not considered that my mental health is at a point of concern.

It is always text book do this or do that and do not take into account the mental barriers I have developed as coping method, which is not so much coping as much as trying to keep up appearances.

An example, which I am not even sure if it even makes sense is : if I do not have a immediate reason to, I do not go outside.... an immediate reason primarily doing something for someone else's sake... which leads to me not going outside much at all, I cannot mentally motivate myself a reason to do something for myself.

Other advice I have been told tell me to be to selflessly kind and to show love and it will be returned, but my experiences trying have only led twisted failures as it brings back memories of opening myself to others and having it being taken advantage of and leaving me more bitter as a result. I believe my younger self attempted to embrace those values too readily and the real world was eager to correct the nail sticking out.

Which I believe has lead to a desparate desire to form bonds, as a form of self-correction from the attempt to avoid connections from the perceived pain it brought and in doing so fall victim to unscrupulous individuals that take advantage of it for their own benefit and even when I found people who not intentionally malicious, something still happens that ends up causing pain.

It is like have developemed a twisted moral code around what I assumed people want from someone to have - honesty, loyalty, integrity - and the values being destroyed as one is confronted with a world running on hypocrisy run by the status quo and then questioning why people are like they way they are as the perceived most sucessful make use of deception and selfishness to make use of people for their own self interest without consideration for another. Throwing others away the moment they get what they want.

It hurts to put trust in others and then being hurt, especially when they take pride in their self-indulgence whether they intentionally do it or not

I think the person who decided to cut ties came to the conclusion that I was, To quote from the video https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=5L1sJ99jklc at around the 6 minute mark, :

"being so desparate to change yourself, but being unable to communicate those feelings. It can make you latch onto people in an unhealthy way, unfairly placing the burden of change on them when they can't help you in the way you want"

was something they probably thought they needed to do. That and mentioned that they feel like they are walking on eggshells and that I was scaring them - not in a physical violence sense but more in they are concerned of me "losing" it and them being caught in the crossfire.

I do feel there is more to write, but I feel I need to try and contain the "Pandora's Box" from opening full tilt everytime I write ... so I guess I am just shouting into the void as I feel emotionally mixed ( ranging between numbness and anger) from losing yet another person from feeling overwhelmed in loneliness and expressing myself to another who has context to what I feel, but ended up relying on them too much

CW Major Trigger ::: spoiler spoiler recently I feel closer and closer to just ending it, I have essentially became aware that all of my friends put me in the outer circle of our friend group, and actively view me as a child. I am autistic but also I feel like my friends view me as disgusting with no real solution of what to do with me, I live with them and the only option I realistically have other than this is to move in with my mom who tends to emotionally depend on me.

I know that I am always the friend but never the best friend, I have no inner circle where I feel like I can talk about my thoughts and how dark things have gotten recently. I feel like if I told my friends it would likely result in me being hospitalized and than having my stuff moved out and kinda told "no one ever liked you and we have felt that way for a really long time". I don't blame them I know I am annoying and socially awkward, I know my depression has lead me to neglect things in my life. Keep in mind this is not me being autistic, many of our friends are ND as well, this is me specifically. Part of the reason I have not tried yet was that I am afraid it will be viewed as emotionally manipulated, the truth of this world is that no one wants to see the social behind and awkward 23 year transfem blow her brains out, but people can think your weird thats their right.

Me being trans is always a side fact, HRT has not done me good, people tell me I look like a women to be nice but in reality I look disgusting, I look like some cringe fetish account you will find on Reddit that everyone equally agrees is disgusting.

People I do talk to on discord from time to time will say I am just overthinking it, since no one has outright said they hate me, or think that. but the truth is i have heard them say "I don't want her to hear xyz" or say thing about me right outside of ear shot.

What's kept me alive other than worrying it will come off as emotionally manipulative to my "friends" is the fact my mom has repeatedly told me over and over she will off herself if I do, it's like a known thing that i cannot avoid. it's guilt I have to carry, I do hate the fact this is true and i carry a ton of guilt and i usually ball my eyes out when I am confronted with this morality problem, but I remember the first time I attempted I overcame this and just accepted that it is what it is. I also do fear death, i don't know what comes after but in that moment I consider that maybe whatever it is I deserve that. I don't deserve to walk this earth anymore. I sometimes watch the sucide ending to cyberpunk, not cause i actually think anyone would care about me like that but I am reminded that no one really cares about me like that.

There was a time when I had dreams and goals in life, I wanted to work in tech, I wanted to get bachelors degree I wanted to have friends, but the truth is I never realized how gross I was until now, I never realized my transition would be a failure, I never realized just how much i got on peoples nerves

I often want to just run away and restart I try to distract myself from reality imaging maybe an internship or anything else to get my life back on track. than maybe buy a car but I know that not really possible anymore :::

NOTICE TO LEMMY MODERATORS

Hi, I understand your concerns and want to help out, I know in this rare instance you likely think giving my IP to the pigs is a moral good, and that I will get the help I need, the main mental hospital I would go to is currently facing sexual abuse allegations, my roommates would likely kick me out during my stay at the mental hospital assuming that I am not a danger to myself and that it would be much safer to do it at this time. I am currently 9k in debt if you combine credit card, and existing medical debt, with zero income. you doing this would likely add additional financial strain to my already difficult to justify existence. If you do this I would likely be even closer than I already am. and I would likely not vent online next time.