Similar story. In college I knew someone suffering from bipolar disorder. There's a lyric from Andrea Gibson's "Nutritionist"—"Some people will never understand the kind of superpower it takes for some people to just walk outside." Every day for her for months at a time was just agonizingly painful for her to get through, beyond my abilities to accurately describe in a quick comment on the internet.
The vast majority of the anti-suicide efforts were just—insulting in her case, in a lot of ways. There were a lot of people and organizations telling her very loudly not to kill herself, and that it would get better if she just stuck it out a little more and saw a therapist. There was a legal and medical system willing to lock her up, for a fee, and keep her from actually physically harming herself. (This terrified her. She said her stay in a mental institution had been horrific and entirely unhelpful—they basically put her in solitary and kept her from doing anything at all, for hours. They wouldn't even let her have a pen and paper to write with because they were concerned that she would use it for self-harm.)
But there was nobody actually providing a way to make her life less painful. She came from a wealthy background and had good health insurance, so could afford weekly therapy sessions and psych meds. Some of the pills would work, for a few months or weeks at a time, but none of them were permanently helpful—and most of them took weeks to titrate up to an effective dose, so with each switch there would be a huge gap of time where she was as bad off as ever and nobody knew if the next pill would even work.
The anti-suicide efforts were like—it was like she was burning alive, and there were all these organizations and people in place determined to keep her from shooting herself to end the pain. But there was nobody who could actually stop her from burning.
I don't know. It's an awful situation all around. There are definitely a lot of people who are just temporarily upset or suffering from mild and easily treatable depression who do benefit from things like fences on bridges and national help hotlines. But more research is definitely needed. Someone else said in this thread that what we should really be doing is trying to keep people off the ledge entirely, not just trying to keep them from jumping, and I definitely agree there. What we really need is ways to keep people from wanting to die, not just ways to keep them from committing the act.