Tag: suicide

A new study found that prazosin was associated with increased insomnia and nightmares, and did not reduce suicidal thoughts.

The hotline “counselor” will tell you that, if you’re unable to keep yourself safe, they will have to send you some “help.” We all know that what they mean is not a friend or a therapist but the police. Because strangers, usually big white men with guns, keep everyone safe and are not triggering, traumatizing or on power trips at all.

From Ricochet: "'Personal individual solutions of therapists, of internalizing it, and that kind of stuff, is problematic,' explains McKay. 'Our own view is...

From The Conversation: "Suicide is already among the leading causes of death worldwide. For people aged 15-55 years, it is among the top five...

Today is the 10th anniversary of David Foster Wallace’s suicide. While it’s not fair to build an entire theory on an incredibly complicated issue like suicide around one person, Wallace’s death should challenge the common narratives around suicide — that “mental illness” causes it and that “we can’t ever know why people do it.” Both of these are self-serving platitudes that are simply not true.

From The New York Times: "When Harrison Fowler heard about the counseling center at Stanford, where he enrolled as a freshman last fall, he...

STAT recently published an opinion piece arguing that the black box warning on antidepressants has led to an increase in adolescent suicide. It is easily debunked, and reveals once again how our society is regularly misled about research findings related to psychiatric drugs. STAT has lent its good name to a false story that, unfortunately, will resonate loudly with the public.

Of course one wishes for an easy answer, but the things that conspire to drive a person over the edge are too numerous and varied ever to point and say, it was this one; one can never really be so certain. No one can say it wasn’t that one, or that it wasn’t really all of those together, or that, when it came my own turn for “insanity,” I wasn’t standing halfway over the edge already, waiting for gravity to kick in and for me to fall.

From Florida State University: "Are you a suicide attempt survivor? Researchers at Florida State University have teamed up to better understand the psychological and...

The suicide crisis is real. The pain is real. The deaths are real. None of us can afford to stick our heads in the sand and pretend that this isn't happening. But the helplessness and confusion about what to do about it are also real. And that's why peer relationships and peer-developed modalities can be so helpful. Many of us have been there and are still alive to talk about it. We know what ways of relating gave us hope and helped us to continue on.

What if the key to saving someone is to admit you are powerless to save anyone at all? What would that beckon us to change? A few years ago, I spent a substantial amount of time talking with a man who entered my life because someone in the mental health system told him I might be the one who could save him (or at least, that’s how he heard it). His name was David.

From NPR: "The medical profession relies on the premise that doctors and medical staff, like highly trained endurance athletes, are conditioned to clock long...

From Medical Xpress: "To tease out the role of temperature from other factors, the researchers compared historical temperature and suicide data across thousands of U.S....

From NPR: "Many people who attempt suicide end up in an emergency room for immediate treatment. But few of those suicide survivors get the follow-up...

From Slate: "In a survey my organization, Promundo, carried out with support from Axe, of 1,500 young men aged 18–30, we found that nearly 1 in 5...

From The New York Times: "Empirical studies bear this out. A felt lack of meaning in one’s life has been linked to alcohol and drug...

From MinnPost: "More than a third of adults in the United States may be taking prescription medications that have depression or suicidal thoughts as...

Together, we can hold individuals who are plumbing the depths of their pain and help them to transform it. We can show them that there is another, med-free way to accept themselves and that there is precedent for what it looks like to break free from psychiatry, its labels, and consciousness-warping chemicals.

"A suicide hotline can give a suicidal person someone to talk to. I don’t want to downplay the importance of that. When someone needs...

From Big Think: "One commonality among those contemplating suicide is a lack of meaning in life. Someone doesn’t care about them, the world doesn’t...

From The Conversation: "The sum of our scientific evidence indicates that, just like most other things in nature, the causes and predictors of suicide...

From The Conversation: "It is not clear what exactly drives the demand for the psychoactive substances and what has driven the increase in suicides....

We live in a culture of mandated positivity and compulsory happiness, which somehow remains untouched by the current political, social, ecological and economic realities of the world. If you’re distressed, it must either be your bad attitude (which is a choice) or your broken brain (which is not a choice); god forbid we look anywhere outside the self.

Scapegoating a purported unseen "illness" may provide temporary comfort from acknowledging the horrors and injustice of the world, but it is a delusion — and one with fatal consequences for many. When 45,000 people a year would rather die than live in this world any longer, it might behoove us all to consider what is happening in the world to cause this.

From The Intercept: Shortly after Chelsea Manning posted what appeared to be two suicidal tweets on May 27, police broke into her home with their...