Hello I Want to Die Please Fix Me: Depression in the First Person is written by journalist Anna Mehler Paperny, and is both a story of her own personal experiences of suicidality and an in-depth journalistic exploration of depression and suicide. The author has done her research well. The book contains information gleaned from interviews with … Continue reading Book Review: Hello I Want to Die Please Fix Me
I first learned about the concept of cognitive deconstruction a while back when I reviewed Jesse Bering's book Suicidal: Why We Kill Ourselves. He wrote about it as a process of narrowed thinking that can occur leading up to a suicide attempt. The American Psychological Association defines cognitive deconstruction as: "a mental state characterized by … Continue reading Cognitive Deconstruction and the Lead Up to Suicide
It's week #7 for the Working On Us mental health prompt series over at Beckie's Mental Mess. Visit her post to see the guidelines to participate. Content warning: This week's topic is suicidal ideation. Prompt #1 Questions Have you ever experienced suicidal thoughts? Have you ever attempted suicide? Were you ever hospitalized for a suicidal … Continue reading Working On Us – Week #7
First off, we'll establish a couple of things: If you're having thoughts of suicide and need to reach out, there's a list of crisis resources here. No need to worry about me; I'm not currently suicidal. I recently saw a post by Elizabeth of Life. Love. Bipolar. on the topic of suicide attempts and the way … Continue reading No Regrets? Surviving Attempted Suicide
Beckie from Beckie's Mental Mess is starting a new weekly mental health prompt called Working On Us. You can visit Beckie's post to get all of the details plus the picture prompt for this week. I'm going to do the written prompt: When you first found out that you had a mental illness/disorder, what was … Continue reading Working On Us (mental health prompt)
Getting By: Understanding Lifelong Depression is a memoir by Jack Trelance. The author has lived with depression since his teens, and admits to planning his first suicide attempt at age 14. He describes his first suicide attempt at age 25, and afterwards he didn't feel sadness but rather "a slow-burning anger and frustration, coupled with resigned, … Continue reading Book Review: Getting By
The emerging blogger series is aimed at community building through giving mental health bloggers who are early in their blogging evolution the opportunity to have their work seen by a wider audience. It's also a way to introduce you as a reader to some newer members of our community. This post is by Megan of … Continue reading Emerging Blogger Series: Megan
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