Hundreds of suicidal teens sleep in emergency rooms
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
This is never really questioned. I have some doubts. Seems to me you’re more likely to see success with a radical life change. Moving far away to a different lifestyle.
Managing to prevent a suicidal person from committing suicide is a pretty weak target metric imo.
How many suicidal people are suicidal simply because the specific lifestyle before them is the only norm they know of and they just don’t want it?
Many people cite stats about how previously suicidal people are glad they didn’t commit suicide successfully but it’s got obvious survivor bias from those that did and don’t get a say.
- She spends over a week in the emergency dept. at Boston Children's.
- A bed opens up in the hospital proper; she spends another ~3 weeks there.
- She moves to an inpatient treatment center (of the kind advocated by the doctor quoted above), spends a week there, and doesn't find it very helpful.
- She returns home and spends the summer working at a fast-food place; she still self-harms but manages to hide it for a while.
- In the fall, suicidal again (or perhaps she always was), she returns to the inpatient facility for two more weeks, then transitions into an outpatient program.
- She's still having a hard time, so she goes to a different hospital and stays for three weeks. By now it's mid October 2021 (iiuc); her initial visit to Boston Children's was in late April.
- The last update is that she continues to self-harm, has gotten better at hiding it, and has learned not to admit to adults that she's suicidal.
Pretty f'ing bleak! Not that I would have any idea who or what to blame in such a situation. The silver lining is that this person is still alive, a year after the first hospitalization.
It was until I hid from everyone that I was suicidal, refused all help from the broken and abhorrent ‘mental health care system’, stopped seeking treatment - and finally realized that the system is there to put you away and stop bothering people (family, etc.) rather than to fix any of the actual underlying issues in your life - that I stopped being suicidal.
Continuing to be forced into this kind of ‘treatment’ - one more hospital visit - would’ve been what killed me, for sure.
I have never experienced such a deep-seated feeling of not just wanting - but needing, to die - outside of a mental health hospital.
I cannot effectively describe the utter helplessness of already feeling totally hopeless - only to then be strapped to a table and restrained; while bright fluorescent lights pierce at you from overhead, completely alone and isolated - until you wish you’d just taken your life already - so you wouldn’t have to be experiencing…this.
I’ve had maybe half a dozen friends who have been suicidal and gone through this hospital bullshit that worsens the situation rather than getting basic therapy and a shift in lifestyle that they need.
This ER bullshit doesn’t help anyone. Everyone on the inside, when allowed to talk to each other - often talks about how we are working out our lies to tell our doctors so we can get the hell out of there. There’s no genuine desire for healing. It’s a prison.
And all anyone who is forcefully admitted into that prison just wants out.
I’m not suicidal anymore - because I chose to keep it completely inside - not tell anyone, and work on myself.
I realized opening up about suicidal feelings, if you have them - is literally the worst thing you can do.
You’ll end up in one of these institutions; the hell of a lot worse off than you were beforehand.
The best you can do if you need therapy - is to make a call to a help line through a VoIP on a proxy, though a generated phone number on an application like TextPlus.
Our system does work for some people. But it is frustrating and fails others. If anyone wants to build a better one, please do.
We need more answers, more options, and more help. ERs are definitely not the answer. The fact that a local family doc can fly someone to a trauma center on a helicopter for a life-threatening physical problem in a matter of minutes, while an equally life-threatening mental problem requires weeks or months of wait lists is a huge freaking problem. We absolutely should be looking for better answers. In the meantime, we do the best we can with what we have to try to save the lives of our children. We all hope for something better in the long run, but I at least appreciate that articles like this are exposing the problems.
I don't know how we can achieve it, but we somehow need to get to a society which each individual cares for and engages with people in need, and not just wish them away to some system which is supposed to substitute for our own caring and engagement.
I was suggesting more of a society-wide caring, which I describe in more detail in another post in this thread:
That is an unfair portrayal. Parents are not psychologists, not nurses or doctors, and have limits. We can give our absolute most to care for our children and still need more help.
There are so many ways to help and become more engaged with one's community and people in need. If everyone did more social service of this kind instead of focusing just on themselves and their friends and family, while (at best) paying others to care for people in their community, we'd be so much better off.
Kids and adults see a broken society where they and the people around them are just not cared about, ignored, left to rot, or are even actively attacked/harmed. That alone is traumatizing and disheartening. There's so much pain in the world and it's tempting to disengage and withdraw. A more caring world would be a psychological boon to everyone.
Who cares about her wellbeing as long as we forced her to stay alive no matter what, right?
Humans love to talk about empathy and yet it always seems to be completely absent when referring to suicidal individuals.
I'm not so sure. People tend to take their problems with them. Changing external circumstances may help some, but even then the improvement tends to be short-lived until their demons come back to haunt them. Severe depression is rarely so easily cured.
"Many people cite stats about how previously suicidal people are glad they didn’t commit suicide successfully but it’s got obvious survivor bias from those that did and don’t get a say."
I've never attempted suicide (and if I ever did I'd make sure to succeed), but have felt suicidal throughout most of my life. Am I glad I never did it? Only to the extent that I'm glad I didn't traumatize or ruin the lives of people who care about me. If it wasn't for my reluctance to indirectly hurt people who care about me I'd be gone long ago. Best for me is to have never been born at all. I think a lot of people are only alive because they don't want to hurt people close to them.
I very much doubt a failed suicide attempt would change my mind on any of this. It would just have led to more misery for me and the people who care about me.
I've seen interviews with suicide survivors who regret trying, and they've tended to be people who just acted impulsively and didn't think through the consequences (teens are a prime example of this). People like me who've thought carefully about it for years or decades are unlikely to fail and unlikely to be glad they survived if they somehow fail anyway.
But I could never go through with it, survival instinct is a bitch and I'm basically a coward. I would still be happy if I got killed quickly somehow. Surviving an attempt would most likely make me feel even more like a loser.
Note that I never did it for attention - I told no one, no one knew. They'd be as shocked as my parents when I told them I was heavily bullied throughout school.
The context here is teens. Of course the majority of them have underlying "demons," but combining that with the bleak realities of having to decide what to do with your adult life while having drastically limited perspective on your choices is a huge trapdoor that needs to be avoided before they can get to higher levels of self repair.
No, it really must depend on what makes one suicidal. A cannot bear his environment, B is afflicted with a chronic pain, C practices inadequate self management, D relives traumas, etc.: if A improves diet, starts to exercise, solves the nuisance of a bad back and hindered sleep, then his situation will improve and yet he will go on hating his life after his own environment - but if A finds an environment that matches his personality and aspirations, he will probably be "happy" (literally - living the fortunate occurrence) even in spite of bearing other "nuisances". It does not seem logical otherwise.
It should probably be noted ("just to be sure" in terms of communication) that a number of those conditions may not have a practically easy solution. Also, that an absolute condition of suicidal tendency is not the only cause for suicide.
I've tried all the "normie" shit, I really did. My brain is simply fucked.
The only thing that worked is medication (and not the standard ones, what I'm taking would not even be considered by most doctors in Europe - but it would in the US). The dumbest thing here is I would be put in prison if anyone found out.
Now I've mostly fixed depression and anxiety, the only thing remaining is my attention/self-control - ADHD, and illegal stimulants work for that but they're not quite enough, I need to be very careful to take them under specific circumstances so I can form new habits and retrain my brain. I'm basically doing Cognitive Behavioural Therapy all on my own.
This is pretty bad - when you fuck up for decades, it's extremely hard to better yourself, especially when you realize just how badly things went.
> The "what" is way trickier than that
The "what" /may be/ way trickier than that. Not all suicidal tendencies come from an "effed brain" (in your terms). The statement from pmoriarty does not have universal validity - it's actually substantially false -, and it is a bad point of view with regard to those for whom solutions to their afflictions exist.
Please could you share what worked for you?
If you do not want to do it publicly, I would appreciate if you email me this medication (my mail is in my profile).
Just to clarify things, I am not suicidal, but someone I know is.
I’ve cycled through many antidepressants and people to talk to, but my doctors and therapists don’t seem to know or be interested that diet may impact mental health.
PS: Duck fat is delicious to fry potatoes with.
People's bodies differ, and they may have different nutrient deficiencies/overdoses depending on what they eat and how they live their life (most obviously, those who don't get much sun are more likely to lack vitamin D).
Everyone who suffers from depression should definitely take a hard look at their diet and at whether they have some nutritional deficiency or imbalance, and see if they can get more exercise and sunlight, to start with.
Of course therapy with a respected therapist you like and trust can be helpful too.. and medication helps some people, though personally I view it as more of a bandaid that only treats symptoms and not the underlying cause.
-- The importance of the impact of non-evident factors bringing unwellness;
-- Individual difficulties in assessing sources for unwellness and identifying them;
-- A widespread disregard for subtleties as an ever-increasing mark in societies.
This ever-spreading construct that one can disregard and overcome any stimulus, so people can just live under any condition, which could be dismissed as unimportant (to the point of seeing large masses of people utterly oblivious to all feedback). While others were educated on keeping subtleties in the highest regard...
But that is 100% of the job of an emergency room. They aren't there to save a life. They are there to stabilize a situation, to keep people alive for a few hours/days until they can be triaged and moved on to other facilities. So I would not expect anything more from an ER beyond the simple metric of the person remaining alive through the night. Long term solutions are not their department.
ER’s are good for some crises, and suicidal inclinations are a crisis, ergo ER is good for suicidal inclinations? No. That’s not logical.
As someone with a lot of experience of teens in crisis, this is the most prevalent underlying theme. Radical broadening of perspective is indeed the solution, but it is a pretty complex thing to achieve in a system that is underfunded and built to allow parents and overarching social structures to avoid taking responsibility.
It's pretty much tautological, no? Either you're (still) suicidal or you're glad you didn't previously commit suicide.
> How many suicidal people are suicidal simply because the specific lifestyle before them is the only norm they know of and they just don’t want it?
Perhaps there is a philosophical challenge in the standard definitions of mental illness, which more or less amount to "thinking in a manner which causes distress or impairs your functioning".
We like to pretend that ordinary people ought to have the fortitude to face whatever adversity comes their way-- a belief that is easier to sustain for those who aren't currently facing great adversity.
When environment is part of the problem, The idea of returning to an unchanged situation seems unlikely to be productive. A couple of thoughts:
Most adolescents need to find a 'peer group' to be part of on the path to independent adulthood. Easy for some; hard for others. I recall a high school student who was having problems and who moved to another ('alternative') school in a different part of the country for a year. There they found a very supportive peer group. When they returned to the original school as a senior, the problems were gone. The school hadn't changed ... their perspective had.
I recall from history that a good many 'notable' historical figures left home in their early teens. They were perhaps one-in-a-hundred who are remembered ... not at all uncommon in the past. Were those times more dangerous? One of my grandparents was 16yo when they left behind family and friends in Europe to sail to the US. Another, 16yo grandparent left rural Canada behind to grow-up in the US. (Both joined friends/relatives.) Are these options legal now? Are we 'trapping' our action-seeking/outsider teens? Is 'therapy' another name for 'my way or the highway'?
Prevention is not possible in some cases (sometimes genetic or traumatic origin for example), but the root cause is generally a combination of environmental context and vulnerability. If you live in a culture where taboos and other people telling you what you can or can't do in your personal life are part of daily life, a lot of avenues of support (and by extension, prevention) become unavailable. That applies to much tighter scopes like family and much broader scope like city or national levels all the same.
Quite the way to conclude the article.
All I'm really saying is that your 3 for 1 statistic, may be counting suicides in Switzerland that nobody is trying to prevent, and are instead actually facilitating:
Are you aware that a whole swath of society blames the current problems on over regulation of the economy, obsession over race and lack of religion.
Both sides are not able to convince the other, which means we actually don't know how to solve this and the proposed solutions go in opposite directions, that is, every side claims the solutions of the other are actually detrimental. How do you know you're right?
> US has been and continues to be a brutal regime, and everyone on this site pretends it isn't because that's the false narrative you want to believe.
In comparison to what other regimes? Are the fifty million immigrants in USA and the hundreds of millions that want to come to come to USA also pretending?
Why does it have to be in comparison? I don't have to say, well at least I'm better than that guy and pretend thats good enough. There could be serious flaws with myself that I should acknowledge could be way better than turning and pointing a finger at others.
And talking to those immigrants, the impression I have always gathered is that they don't believe the US is better, but that they have no alternatives where they come from. Lots of people immigrate to whatever country they can get to. If you sum up all immigration to Europe, you suddenly see that the US isn't quite the leader you think it is.
Geography puts a lot of constraints in who can travel where.
A lot of people came in western Europe from Afghanistan or central Africa by walking [0]. You need two months, so it's not an insurmountable task. Most dangers come from predatory people.
Walking to US could be done from central or south America. A similar feat would be going from Bogota to San Diego. Yet it means much less people are in situation to walk to US than to Western Europe.
[0] https://www.google.com/maps/dir/Kabul,+Afghanistan/Calais+Eu...
Your argument is hard to understand, but what I read here is, "economic regulation is good because otherwise, economic regulation would be decreasing", and similar with religion and racism, which shows an outstanding lack of knowledge regarding all the societies that have adopted measures negative for them.
> Why does it have to be in comparison?
Agreed, there's no contradiction in saying the USA is brutal and one of the less brutal regimes in the world, to the point that it's the number one destination from immigrants that can actually choose where to live.
> Agreed, there's no contradiction in saying the USA is brutal and one of the less brutal regimes in the world, to the point that it's the number one destination from immigrants that can actually choose where to live.
That also does not mean the USA is working and working well for people, hence the millions of suicidal teens. It's possible that no system is working.
I'll leave this as homework, find societies than have ended worse than they were without any external cause, you can group by democratic, aristocratic and dictatorial societies, examples are not scarce.
> I would like an example and also an explanation for why these things aren't solved problems in America then?
Because we don't know how to solve these issues. I'm not sure what you'd like an example of.
> That also does not mean the USA is working and working well for people, hence the millions of suicidal teens. It's possible that no system is working.
Agreed, my point this whole time is that what you call the solution other people call the cause.
I don't know, the Romans were pretty democratic so I've been told and they collapsed due to internal reasons. Lots of empires that weren't so democratic lasted much longer. Is that your point?
> Because we don't know how to solve these issues. I'm not sure what you'd like an example of.
I'd love an actual example, matter of factly.
> Agreed, my point this whole time is that what you call the solution other people call the cause.
Has there ever been a government that is completely atheistic and yet is doing well, thriving in fact? Hmmm...you may not like that answer to that me thinks.
Do you think Obamacare was beneficial for the USA society? The cut in taxes by Trump? The wars in Irak, in Afghanistan? Did the fed ever get it wrong? Just within the last years there's a huge number of decisions that I'd imagine you'd think maybe had a bad effect on the country, regardless of your political inclinations.
> Has there ever been a government that is completely atheistic and yet is doing well, thriving in fact? Hmmm...you may not like that answer to that me thinks.
Elaborate please. Isn't the government of Norway atheistic, or Switzerland?
..why would that be? As if people know how to anyways act in their own self interest?
I'd say it has more to do with both sides being so certain that the other is wrong. I will say the one thing conservatives have on their side is that it is true suicide rates for teens used to be much lower. So there's a plenty strong argument for religion, maybe. Then again grouping all religions into one makes no sense-- I don't know if any people have evaluated how many Buddhist, Muslim, and jainist teens are suicidal to actually see the comparative difference between them rather than just assuming it's all identical. So I don't think there's enough evidence to say anything useful about that
And lower teen suicide rates does not mean conservatives have that on their side. Most kids are raised religious in America these days. The whole country constantly talks about god. Maybe actually the conservatives are the main source of modern day suicide because of their CONSTANT presence and influence that people are starting to disagree with.
Who said people knew how to act in their self interest in the past? People just have more options now, whereas in the past it was much more taboo to openly reject religion. There's a lot more freedom to do a lot of things
>The whole country constantly talks about god.
Hard disagree. I don't know what tv shows you're watching but I can't remember the last time a popular piece of media had religion as an important feature. Most shows are pretty secular, as is other media
So people do not know how to act in their own self interest. Maybe there is a way to help with that...
The consequence too is that deep learning rarely happens. Kids learn enough math to pass a test, but don't develop a sense of creative problem solving. They learn enough French to pass a grammar quiz or an AP exam, but not to converse with a person in France.
School has become a place that is not focused on learning, but performing, and often performing well according to arbitrary standards.
My current focus is on helping families opt out and design their children's education through modular learning (homeschool 2.0), not going to school from 9-3, but through a mosaic of educational, social and childcare experiences: community classes, meetups, learning apps, books, online classes, tutors, apprenticeships. The assessment and accountability is available through incredible tools like CoGat, MobyMax or just assessments built into mastery-based, adaptive learning apps.
People often say, but how do kids socialize? Won't they get isolated and depressed?
The irony here is when you read an article like this and see how depressed kids currently are IN SCHOOl.
School is a socially engineered environment. Kids sit in classes of other kids the same age and stress out about how to do on tests. They have little time for real socialization because they are overburdened with homework. They have no time for plan and relaxation (recess only being 30 minutes a day) They don't get enough sleep and they don't have time to reflect or study the topics that interest them independently or do outside projects. Often they are also overloaded with extracurriculars like gymnastics and piano that they have to take outside of school because it's not available in school. These extracurriculars are often part and parcel of the big game plan to get them into college and add even more stress. For example, practicing an hour of piano a day outside of lessons to prepare for competitions.
kids whose bodies are not designed to sit still 6 hours a day are given ritalin to force them to conform to an unnatural system when they would learn so much better if they had the freedom to move around. It's decided something is wrong with them because they need to move their bodies.
Schools develop clicks and often kids who feel isolated join groups that revolve around experimenting with drugs or alcohol, the only groups within they feel included.
The children doing modular learning (homeschool 2.0) get to design their own social experiences. If they are in an urban environment, or even a rural one, this can be working on projects together, going on field trips, 9th graders mentoring 1st graders and teaching them to read, playing at the beach.
These kids have busy, full social lives that often include groups that meet with parents and grandparents as well. Kids aren't separated from adults all day. They get to learn from older kids and mentor younger children. Their aren't these exclusive clicks and bullying we see in private and public school.
And last but certainly not least, they get to sleep in! Teenagers bodies are not designed to get up at 6am every day for school. They need lots of lovely sleep to be healthy!
This is kind of a rant, but it's so clear to me that this entire system is set up to produce huge stress and anxiety for kids, with very few tangible benefits to their well being.
Our teens are depressed. They are suffering. But there is another way. It doesn't have to be like this for them to have succeed and have rich, meaningful lives right now.
BTW Social media and the impact it has on children is a whole other topic, but a big piece of this.