Tag: suicide prevention

MIA's Julia Lejeune interviews scholar, activist, and educator Pata Suyemoto about lived experience activism and racial justice in the mental health field.

I learned at a young age that my suicidal thoughts and feelings would be met with panic and punishment from adults.

Even after their own advisory committee criticized call tracing, leaders of the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline have been lobbying government for cutting-edge mass surveillance and tracking technology. Privacy experts are raising concerns.

A trial in veterans who had survived a previous suicide attempt was stopped early because the drug was found to be no better than a placebo.

Our approach is to openly care about our clients and empower them as much as possible. It's vital that clients know we care about their survival.

It's really hard to talk about suicide. We are constantly constrained by the notion that our mental health is our individual responsibility to manage, told to “live our best lives” by a never-ending campaign of exploitative wellness fads. A more collective conversation is needed.

Current suicide assessment practices of the VA are reductive and do not allow for the individual’s narrative to be heard.

In March, MIA Continuing Education is launching an 11-seminar course that will provide new insights into understanding the factors driving the increase in suicide, and tell of “therapeutic” approaches that “demedicalize” suicide and offer new ways to help people in crisis.

The Defense Cascade is a survival framework that evolutionary researchers are exploring as an explanation for extreme states that many people experience. It can help explain why chronic stress can make us feel like ending our life is the only reasonable way out.

If you wanted to capture my mindset at the peak of suicidal longings — crushing odds, repeated failures, futility of existence, huge obstacles weighing me down — the story of Sisyphus would be it. After one too many trips around this block, enter suicide: the fail-safe tactic for escaping unbearable pain and suffering.

On World Mental Health Day, UN expert Dainius Pūras calls for a shift away from medical solutions toward a rights-based approach to make life “more liveable.” He calls for states to address societal determinants of mental health, promoting autonomy and resilience.

Large, centralized, digital social networks and data-gathering platforms have come to dominate our economy and our culture. In the domain of mental health, huge pools of data are being used to train algorithms to identify signs of mental illness. I call this practice surveillance psychiatry.

The rate of death due to heart-related problems is more than double the rate in the general population after psychiatric hospitalization.

New study finds that people who felt they were coerced into being hospitalized were more likely to attempt suicide later.

The Youth-Nominated Support Team intervention invites adolescents to select adults in their life to receive training on how to support them.

Ever since the cops and CPS were called on me by someone at an ASIST Suicide Prevention training, I've been trying to see it all as a gift. What better proof to counter those who claim it's "safe" to tell than what happened to me? What better evidence that our system responses are seriously off track? It wasn't safe. Not for me.

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.

For more than 7,300 days of my life, waking up the next morning required me to make a conscious choice to diligently pursue something — anything — other than my impulse to die. Maybe the best teachers of how to avoid suicide will not be the people who are afraid someone else will die, but those of us who can explain how and why we regularly choose to live.

Why is it that members of the community who have no formal education in psychology or counseling or therapy like myself are receiving more training in compassion and effective responses to the public health crisis that is suicide than “professionals?” My coworkers at the crisis center are far less pathologizing, cold and judgmental than those with licenses to “help.”

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...

Study finds that traditional healers in South Africa, whose services are widely used by the country’s population, perform important suicide prevention work.

Researchers investigate services related to suicide prevention across mental health providers in England.

The controversy with 13RW is essentially a clashing of worlds — the world of entertainment (and its predominant audience of teens) and the world of science and practice. Who’s to say those from each perspective cannot find common ground in the service of something with life and death consequences?

Rational Suicide, Irrational Laws is an excellent book that explores the criminalization and decriminalization of suicide. It analyzes laws by which “mental health” professionals and organizations are held accountable or “liable.” It exposes horrific contradictions in how laws are applied, particularly problematizing the assumption that people who kill themselves are suffering from a “mental illness.” There is much in this book that makes me want to stand up and cheer.

In my last two posts, Back in the Dark House Again: The Recurrent Nature of Clinical Depression and Am I Having a Breakdown or Breakthrough? Further Reflections on a Depressive Relapse, I have shared my recent relapse into depression. Although it has been tough, when I wake up each morning I am grateful for one thing — I am not suicidal. Others are not as fortunate.