I was reading an article on Medium recently entitled Please Don't Email Me About Suicide. The author was saying that when she has written before about suicide, she would receive emails from readers expressing that they were suicidal at that time. I agreed with some but not all of what she said, so I thought … Continue reading Hello, stranger? I’m suicidal.
Language matters when it comes to talking about suicide, particularly when in it's mentioned in the media. Sometimes, though, I wonder if getting too nitpicky about language is counterproductive. After all, as stigma researcher Patrick Corrigan says, stigma gets attached to labels but is not a product of those labels. On Twitter I recently came … Continue reading How picky should we be about suicide-related language?
Is there a limit to what's ok to post on social media? I'm not thinking about trolling and other such nastiness, but rather about widely broadcasting messages about being suicidal. I'm not a huge social media user, but I do spend some time on Twitter. I follow around 2500 accounts, pretty much all of which … Continue reading What goes too far on social media?
Have you seen some of the claims out there that suicide is 100% preventable? There are a variety of organizations that promote a zero suicide goal. One example is the Zero Suicide Alliance, which is based in the UK and offers free suicide prevention training in order to help get suicidal people connected to appropriate resources … Continue reading Will suicide ever be 100% preventable?
I recently watched the documentary Letters From Generation Rx on Amazon Prime, which looked at instances of people experiencing significant side effects while on psychiatric medication, including people who took the lives of either themselves or others while on psychiatric meds. One man featured in the film was a Canadian Member of Parliament whose teenage … Continue reading Dead if you do, dead if you don’t? Weighing the risks & benefits of medications
I discovered this quite a while back, but it just popped into my mind again recently. Pinterest won't let you search for the word "depression". If you try, it gives no results, just this message: "If you're in emotional distress or thinking about suicide, help is available." If you search for "depressed" or "major depression", though, … Continue reading Why can’t you search Pinterest for “depression”?
Trigger warning: As the title says, I will be talking about death by suicide. Please consider skipping this post if it could be triggering for you. I was recently reading the book Suicidal: Why We Kill Ourselves, and it included excerpts from the diary of a teenage girl who completed suicide. The diary was … Continue reading Privacy and completed suicide
Suicidal: Why We Kill Ourselves by psychologist Jesse Bering is an attempt to make sense of the complex phenomenon of suicide from a variety of different angles including psychological, biological, spiritual, and evolutionary. The author admits that he takes an intellectualized, scientific perspective to try to gain a broader understanding, and he does a good job … Continue reading Book review: Suicidal: Why We Kill Ourselves
I Am the Architect of My Own Destruction is Juansen Dizon's second book of poetry. The book opens with a letter to the reader, which begins "It’s hard to write when you want to kill yourself. It’s harder when you don’t really know the reason as to why." Throughout the book I felt like I as … Continue reading Book review: I Am the Architect of My Own Destruction
Content warning: This post openly discusses suicide and suicide attempts You can find info here on where to reach out for help if you're in crisis. It's suicide prevention week, so it seems like an appropriate time to talk about suicide in all its ugliness. I have attempted suicide multiple times; most were associated … Continue reading Some thoughts on suicide
You can find info here on where to reach out for help if you're in crisis. Today is World Suicide Prevention Day. It's great to raise awareness, but the problem is, people are still dying. We can talk until we're blue in the face about why and how people should reach out, and there are … Continue reading How do we prevent suicide?
The way the media reports on suicides can affect the likelihood of the suicide contagion (or "copycat") phenomenon. There are a number of organizations that have put together media guidelines for reporting on suicides, and this is a summary of some of their recommendations. Do's: include local crisis line information and other community resources include … Continue reading The way the media talks about suicide matters
In After Suicide, author Charlotte Underwood describes her journey following her father's suicide. The book also serves as a how to guide to picking up the pieces after the suicide of a loved one, both practically and emotionally. She shares the lessons she learned along the way, and speaks openly about some of the destructive … Continue reading Book review: After Suicide
There's lots of information out there about crisis resources for people thinking about suicide, but resources accomplish very little if we don't reach out to access them. There are many reasons people don't seek help, and I wanted to talk about a few of them here based on my own experience with major depressive disorder … Continue reading Suicide and barriers to help-seeking
Sadly, we hear all too often of people who have lost their lives to suicide. Many among us in the mental health blogging community have either attempted suicide or had thoughts of doing so. There are resources available to support us; it's just a matter of knowing what they are and being willing to reach … Continue reading Crisis resources for suicide prevention
