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I heard a woman recently talking on one of the morning radio shows. This woman had tried to commit suicide and failed. She went onto say the very same friends and family who, had she succeeded, would have asked at her funeral ‘oh why didn’t she talk to me’, then blanked her. Like her attempt was somehow contagious. People fear mental illness, in all it’s shapes and forms and no more so than in this country. We have more deaths from suicide than road deaths. Ask yourselves if you were in the position where someone came to you because they needed help and were considering suicide, what would you do or what difference would you try to make? I think we all need to educate ourselves on this. I lost a cousin to suicide. Yet I’m not sure how I’d answer that question if he’d come to me first. That’s what’s scary. There still is such a stigma….
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REPLIES
Fair play to your honesty, as I was reading I was thinking the same thing would I have the words, would I know what to do.
For your sake, and the sake of anyone else reading this.
Don’t stress out over what you would do or say, The best thing to do is listen.
When a person goes to see a counsellor, the counsellor doesn’t really say or do much, they ask probing questions, they recount what you have told them as they understood it and sometimes hearing it another way can make you reevaluate what you originally thought. But it’s not advice, it’s not suggestions – it’s helping the person make sense of what’s got them to this point, and maybe helping them see their *own* way out rather than kill themselves.
It’s called active listening – look it up online and there should be some resources explaining it in more depth.
When someone is at a stage that they feel so stressed out that suicide is a consideration they really need to be listened to – it’s not your job to fix them and to be honest, they would not thank you for it if you did. They need to fix themselves, and active listening is the easiest thing you can do to help them with that.
Sometimes all the suicidal person wants is to be held and be told that things will be okay. This may give them an opportunity to open the floodgates and relieve some of their feelings. I’m speaking as someone who is suicidal and depressed.