The following is a personal treatise on the field of suicide intervention and prevention, and should not be read, nor construed as a letter of present intent.
It should be noted, that whilst it was written about my own experiences with suicide intervention, prevention, and mental health triage in general over the years, and as such, it remains a valid critique from my perspective, I share it with a note of trepidation, because despite my own experiences, I'm loathe to diminish the potential help it may afford those for whom it is more fit.
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The problem with so much "suicide prevention" and "intervention", is that it seems to focus exclusively on stopping the act itself, too often ignoring the real-world threats that may be prompting it.
In my experience, (with rare exception,) preventionists operate under the premise that suicidality, is a maladaptive response to trauma, or emotional injury, and predicated upon thought distortions, and so, they follow one (or more,) of several possible scripts:
•"Suicide is a permanent solution to a temporary problem."
•"As long as you're here, things can always change for the better."
•"Think of the people who love you."
And of course, my favourite bits of psycho-pabulum, (so concise, they easily fit on a bumper sticker, button or tee-shirt,)
•"You are enough."
- and-
•"It gets better".
Whilst these are all lovely sentiments, they completely fail to address the reality that many of us who live our lives with the knowledge that we're unequipped to survive in a world of constant demands to which we're unable to respond, and so we face a lonely, painful existence wherein we're constantly under real-world threat, while those who'd previously offered support, become increasingly frustrated and impatient with us, oblivious to the fact that the help they were offering wasn't the kind of help of which we were able to avail ourselves, until they too disappear, leaving us ever more depleted and burned out than we were to begin with, and so, unless something else takes us out first, eventually, we'll have no choice but to do it ourselves.
Much of the disconnect seems to stem from a complete lack of understanding of less than visible disabilities such as Autism, ADHD, AuDHD, Major Depressive Disorder, C-PTSD, Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, and others as well as differences in extant support systems. It's not necessarily these conditions themselves that are the impetus for suicidality, rather, it's the fact that they can often render us neurologically and therefore, physically unable to effectively navigate the compounding demands of this world, and too often, when we say that we are unable do something, we're disbelieved, and there's an insinuation that we're simply not trying hard enough, and we're labelled as "ungrateful", or worse, disingenuous to begin with.
Believe it or not, when I think of suicide, it's often less about self-dissolution, and more a desperate bid- ironically, to "survive" with my sense of agency, dignity, and safety intact. When it's not about hurt feelings, but the actual inability to survive in this world that's been set up in ways that actively repeatedly cause me harm, the thought of finally becoming immune to those harms, is the only thing that brings me peace.
All of this is to say that, what to others may seem like a desire for self-annihilation, is often born of a final, desperate sense of clarity, of the fact that the obstacles we face, simply in order to continue to exist, are sometimes truly insurmountable, and unless and until the field of suicide prevention comes to terms with such uncomfortable complexities, and commits to actually confronting them, it will remain for many of us, no more than a useless, inappropriate, actually injurious parody.
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