National Suicide Prevention Lifeline

I think you're right that it needs to be more general support, someone I loved had just the last 7% of her life 'covered' by suicide hotlines and 26 years of suffering before them. The final days, weeks, months, it was all just a delaying measure at that point because she'd already come to terms with what she wanted to do.

I don't really think the solution is more hotlines, even generalized ones because you have to want to get help every single time. I think the solution is to shine so much light on mental illness it loses all of the mystery and stigma and becomes as widely discussed and debated as the following 'mentally healthy' ways to kill yourself or someone else:

- Euthanasia, or "mercy" killing because we are glad someone's suffering has ended

- Abortion, literally deciding to end another person's life who is incapable of asking you not to

And of course, the preferred method of suicide that most people will use:

- a slow poison of shitty diets and deadly vices

We never even discussed mental illness or even suicide in high school like we did ethical dilemmas.

We have a Nightline at University of Leeds for anyone to call for anything. It's a great thing for people who just need someone to talk to. Whether they're feeling suicidal or just a bit stressed over exams.

And the number is on the back of every student ID, which means anyone can find their number really easily.

It's apparently closed permanently, but there is some prospect that something will replace it: http://tech.mit.edu/V131/N58/nightline.html

The biggest problem seems to have been that word got out about it outside the MIT community, so that they were getting many calls from non-MIT people. But, their policy was to try to help anyone they could: http://tech.mit.edu/V130/N43/nightline.html

Maybe it would have been better to change the policy than to scrap the whole service.

(BTW I was one of the first Nightline staffers back in 1978.)

In Germany we call it Werther Effekt (following Goethe's novel Die Leiden des Jungen Werther). Public attention to a suicide often triggers additional suicides.

Ketamine may be effective, but is it useful for 'immediate' prevention? I suppose this depends on what you mean by 'immediate'. Someone already posted a link here suggesting a significant number of suicides are impulsive, and many people have planned suicides without their friends or family having any idea.

I can't see how in many of these situations a controlled drug is going to help. We could only administer ketamine to those who exhibit depression or suicidal tendencies, but sadly these signs are not always visible or picked up.

I don't have any numbers, but I know at least 3 people who have used them in the past. When I was younger, I used an anonymous online suicide hotline site (though I don't recall which), which at least made me stop and think, which is often enough.

Probably more effective earlier. Someone living while being horribly depressed all the time isn't exactly a victory, either. I assume suicide hotlines can refer depressed and "suicidal ideation" people, who aren't yet actually killing themselves, to help as well.

I just tried searching Google Scholar, and it turned up studies showing effectiveness:

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1521/suli.33.4.400.252... - "Independent raters measured callers' suicidality and mental state at the beginning and end of 100 taped counselling sessions. Changes in suicidality and mental state were measured using a reliable rating scale developed for the study. Significant decreases in suicidality and significant improvement in mental state were found to occur during the course of counselling sessions, suggesting positive immediate impact."

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1521/suli.2007.37.3.33... - "Significant decreases in suicidality were found during the course of the telephone session, with continuing decreases in hopelessness and psychological pain in the following weeks."

http://link.springer.com/article/10.1023%2FA%3A1022269314076... - "Outcome measures showed observer evaluations of decreased depressive mood from the beginning to the end in 14% of calls, decreased suicidal urgency ratings from the beginning to the end in 27% of calls, and reaching a contract in 68% of calls, of which 54% of contracts were upheld according to follow-up data."

In case people don't know this: these hotlines also help people who are concerned about friends and family members, and there are email-based options like http://www.samaritans.org/.

hm. wrong link... anyway, a re-run:

A friend of mine worked for one for a while. She says it is a mixed bag, you win a lot, you lose some too. It's the toughest thing anybody could pick to do as a job. She's a pretty successful businesswoman and decided to take a years break and looked for something useful to do, ended up manning one of the phones.

Yes there is solid research that it helps - see @britta's comment http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5047160

Anecdotally I worked as a part-time volunteer on a general counselling service for a couple of years in my twenties - which included some suicide calls. A goodly chunk of the time it felt like you made a difference. We occasionally got "thank you" calls weeks/months later to say that we'd stopped folk doing things that they would now regret (sometimes from folk you thought you hadn't helped...)

I actually worked for the national hotline as a volunteer. I worked at a local crisis hotline in the Maryland area, and each one of these places ties into the national hotline, as it does (and please feel free to troll me) a round-robin process and tries to find the closest center given the area code of the caller. I personally handled less than a dozen of these calls. I cannot go into details because we all sign NDA's (surprise, surprise), but I will tell you in all my time we never had someone commit suicide. Also, even volunteer people like myself are trained in suicidology assessment, and getting a stage 3 person warrants you calling law enforcement and/or emergency services given your discretion. In my over a year there, I saw that happen only once when they thought it would be close. I personally talked down many people, and it was my personal opinion those who called the hotline were rarely those were at a level so bad they were going to do it on the phone.

Just my two cents.

I called one once, it's pretty effective, even though his advice didn't work or was dumb, I think just having somebody to listen to you is good enough, during that time nobody, meaning none of my friends, was answering my calls.

I don't have the numbers at hand, but I've heard of a study saying that suicide very often is a very impulsive action. Saying that in most cases there's less than an hour between deciding to commit suicide and the action itself (numbers might be off here).

Looks like I got it from a Freakonomics podcast [1]: "One academic study looked at attempted suicides in Houston among 15 to 34 year olds. It found that in 70 percent of the cases, the time between deciding to commit suicide and taking action was under an hour. Seventy-percent of the cases. For about one-quarter of the people involved, the time gap was five minutes or less."

Of course, from this it doesn't follow that a hotline it necessarily effective. Luckily britta already posted links to some studies.

[1] http://www.freakonomics.com/2011/06/21/the-suicide-paradox-f...

I would imagine that in reality the percentage of callers that actually intend to commit suicide is probably pretty low, regardless of 'studies'. How are you going to really study something like that objectively? I can't imagine that anyone would ever hear about someone who used one successfully. Only the actual suicides are going to make the news like this, which is sad. However, I would think it would be worth it even if a hotline is only able to dissuade even 1/10000 callers intent on committing suicide.

Here we call them something like a 'crisis line'. They aren't just for people who are considering suicide; I have had friends with extreme anxiety who phoned to talk through their fears. This helped them work through crippling anxiety attacks and allowed them to go to class, work, etc. afterwards.

The people on these lines are very well trained at active listening, and that can be useful in a lot of mental health situations where suicide may never have been the end result.

Possibly inconsequential but you have one right here. I've called a suicide hotline more times than I can remember. They don't tell you something resulting in some great epiphany. What they do is talk to you. Simply talk to you, hear what you have to say, keep you on the line and make you feel heard. That's all I needed to calm down. Maybe that's what most people need. No suicide line has ever sent me a form asking if they've done a good job. I imagine they are constantly swamped.

The intention is to help others contemplating the same thing. Who knows, this may help one person out there turn their life around.

It is part of media regulations in many countries/organisations that reporting of suicide must be done in certain ways to reduce the negative effect that may have on potentially vulnerable people. A full list of countries that enforce this on a national level is available from the International Association for Suicide Prevention http://www.iasp.info/media_guidelines.php

One of these requirements is any story involving to suicide or mental health must be accompanied by information about 24-hour crisis support services http://www.mindframe-media.info/for-media/adding-helplines-t...

It's well meaning.

"Hearing about a suicide seems to make those who are vulnerable feel they have permission to do it" -- David Phillips https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copycat_suicide

Unfortunately http://www.reddit.com/r/Music/comments/16e15s/i_transcribed_... was posted and front-paged yesterday.

Google returns a local suicide prevention line number when you google suicide. Perhaps social media sites should discourage posting on the subject at the time of submission, or trying to wrap such content with reminder to the readership that they matter.

I was a counselor at one and yes they will train you on what to say. Generally, you will be trained not to give a lot of advice, but to do reflective listening. It was interesting for me and has helped a lot in my personal life.

Suicide is extremely common among males (compared to women, men end up killing them at self at something like a 10:1 ratio, even though more women than men try to kill them self), particularily young males.

Guess who is most likely to be a programmer?

Well, with due respect, we are as entitled as Lawrence to give an explanation and try to find an answer.

What to Lawrence may be 'a reason' to many of us is not: you are valuable even in jail.

So we try to find a better explanation than 'as he did not want to go to jail, he decided to kill himself', which is quite simplistic.

He hanged himself.