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FCC Approves 988 as Suicide Prevention, Mental Health Crisis Number:
Yesterday the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) unanimously approved [(pdf)] 988 as a nationwide, three-digit phone number that people in crisis can call to speak with suicide prevention and mental health crisis counselors. All phone service providers are required to direct all 988 calls to the existing National Suicide Prevention Lifeline (1-800-273-TALK) by July 16, 2022. This includes all telecommunications carriers and interconnected and one-way Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) service providers. The National Suicide Prevention Lifeline will remain operational during and after the two-year transition to 988.
During the transition to 988, Americans who need help should continue to contact the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline by calling 1-800-273-8255 (1-800-273-TALK) and through online chats. Veterans and service members may reach the Veterans Crisis Line by pressing 1 after dialing, chatting online at http://www.veteranscrisisline.net, or texting 838255. A transcript of the vote is posted here.
Activation of new 988 number will take a while. In the meantime, try calling "911" or:
- Call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at: 1-800-273-8255 (1-800-273-TALK)
- Online chat with National Suicide Prevention Lifeline
Active and former US service members can:
- Call the above phone number and then press "1",
- Chat at http://www.veteranscrisisline.net
- Send a text to 838255.
If nothing else, talk to somebody. It's really important to remember that suicide is a permanent solution to a temporary situation. Help is available; ask for it and don't give up.
NOTE: The above are US-centric. For those who are aware of resources in other countries, please mention them in the comments.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 22 2020, @11:56PM (4 children)
"suicide is a permanent solution to a temporary situation."
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 23 2020, @12:56AM (3 children)
Why? Isn't it true? That little bit of knowledge helped me try other things before suicide. "If it doesn't work, you can always kill yourself tomorrow."
If anything "suicide prevention" is the phrase that should be stopped. As someone who has attempted suicide, "suicide prevention" meant to me that they would forcibly take away the only method I had for ending my living hell. Being tortured is bad enough, having others force you to continue to be tortured with no recourse all while being told 'don't worry, you're just brain damaged' is far, far worse. Call it the Suicidal Hotline or something like that. To me that says call here when you're suicidal. When you are planning to kill yourself, you don't call someone who says they'll stop you from the one thing you have control over. I'd bet money that Prevention word has directly led to people not calling and thus dying.
If anyone's interested, improving my sleep and changing my diet (going 100% carnivore) cured my 17 years of clinical depression. The current scientific theory of depression is your brain gets stuck too long in REM sleep each night for whatever reason and lack of time in the other sleep stages is what causes all the physical and mental problems. The imbalanced neurotransmitter theory has been debunked for ages and even the scientist who came up with that idea said he was wrong. Don't buy into anyone trying to sell you something based off that theory. It's all bullshit.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 23 2020, @01:41PM
I am happy to hear you did not give up and that things are better for you now.
I, too, suffered from clinical major depression after my mom died.
(NOTE: My depression was nothing like having a 'bad day' or 'being down'. More like a total lack of anything that can bring any pleasure. Everything felt dark. Hopeless. Overwhelming. Couldn't see things ever getting better. Just living the rest of my life in perpetual pain and agony and darkness.)
My mom suddenly took ill and was rushed to the hospital. Put on a respirator. Got yo-yo'd between the ICU (Intensive Care Unit) and the CCU (Critical Care Unit). That's for people who are even worse off and need closer monitoring and support than what the ICU could provide. Was the first I knew there even was such a thing. They finally got her stabilized and then performed an operation to help rectify an underlying condition. Unfortunately, the prior two weeks took too much of a toll and they were unable to stabilize her condition afterwards. Various systems were shutting down -- liver, kidneys, etc. It was just a matter of time. We had a family meeting and made the heart-breaking decision to remove life support.
She was the one person I could talk to about almost anything. She was gentle and not judgemental. Full of encouragement and patience. And suddenly gone. It rocked my world like nothing I'd been through before. I was astonished at how many reminders came up each day. A favorite song on the radio. Flowers in the yard. Doing crossword puzzles. Taking a ride in the car. We had done so much together and now she was gone.
I understood, intellectually, that this was to be expected. Unfortunately, it coincided with the dot-com bubble bursting in the early 2000s and I had recently been laid off. Unemployment rate soared. More and more companies were doing layoffs and filing for bankruptcy. Any hope for a new job turned to despair.
I contemplated suicide. Anything I could think of that was sure to work would leave a messy corpse. I could not bear the thought of my family having to deal with that. Knowing my luck, anything else I'd try, I'd probably survive and just end up in a worse situation than I was already in.
An acquaintance noticed something was up and advocated for me. Got me professional help. Medication and therapy helped. I learned coping skills like CBT and DBT. Slowly, I was able to escape the depths of that abyss.
A turning point for me came when I stopped and asked myself why I felt so sad. Others had survived the loss of loved ones... what was my problem? It suddenly came to me:
If she'd been a pain-in-the-ass, I might even have been glad she was gone. I'd known others who had been down that path.
Then I remembered times I'd read the obituaries. Of someone passing away. Leaving behind a loving family. Upstanding member of the community. But, I didn't know that person. Intellectually, I knew others felt a great loss. But not me. This time, with my own mother, I was finally able to realize how I'd been truly fortunate... and I had never realized how much. I never wanted it to end. But we all die, eventually. So, it became my personal mantra. Whenever I felt pain and sadness, I tried to look past the feeling of loss and focus on being grateful that I had such a special person in my life.
I eventually got a job in an entirely different field. I was now working with the general public. Every few weeks I'd meet someone who was grieving for the loss of a loved one. I shared my story. They quickly realized I'd been where they were. That I knew how they felt. By sharing my own experience, I was able to give them hope. They could see I'd been there and was not there any more. I could help people in a way I never could have before.
My pain had become my strength.
An example: There was one co-worker I'd gotten to know pretty well. Had some open conversations over the years. One day she came to me in tears. Her mom passed away suddenly. She knew about my mom's passing and my struggles with it. She knew I would understand. I told her that, some day, someone would come to her just like how she had some to me. That she, too, would be able to draw on her experience to help someone else. She was skeptical, but had come to know I was honest and sincere. We had a few chats over the following months where I'd ask how she was doing and again offer a shoulder to cry on. A couple years later she came to me literally beaming. She had a friend who had just lost a parent. Drawing on her own experience, she was able to offer hope to her friend. Just like how I had helped her. No longer skeptical, she had experienced how her one-time pain was able to help someone else... in a way she never could have before.
I've had major, life-threatening illnesses since then. I no longer fear death. When my time comes, I am ready to go. But, I no longer wish to speed things along. So, if you are struggling, please hang in there and don't give up!
(Score: 2) by fyngyrz on Thursday July 23 2020, @01:50PM
Not for everyone, it isn't.
Some people are in situations where they truly have no hope of bettering their condition, smarmy platitudes aside.
Some things, for some people, are only getting worse. Economically, socially, disease processes, relationships, etc.
People value things differently. I favor this formulation:
Nothing wrong with wanting to help someone; but there may, in fact, be something wrong with pushing "help" upon them if that's not what they actually want. That makes it not help at all.
--
I dream of a world where chickens can cross the
road without having their motives questioned.
(Score: 2) by pdfernhout on Friday July 24 2020, @01:11AM
Some other wellness ideas are collected here by me: https://github.com/pdfernhout/High-Performance-Organizations-Reading-List [github.com]
Other people may especially be interested in: "Therapeutic Lifestyle Change (TLC)" which emphasizes a combination exercise, sunlight and vitamin D (especially from being outdoors), good sleep, face-to-face human connections, eating whole foods and enough omega-3s, and avoiding ruminant negative thinking and other stresses.
https://tlc.ku.edu/ [ku.edu]
"We were never designed for the sedentary, indoor, sleep-deprived, socially-isolated, fast-food-laden, frenetic pace of modern life. (Stephen Ilardi, PhD)"
And also a key book is: "Out of the Nightmare: Recovery from Depression and Suicidal Pain" by David Conroy. By reconceptualizing suicide as an involuntary action that occurs when total pain exceeds resources for coping with pain, David Conroy provides a morally neutral way for organizations and society to think about suicide prevention in a productive way. Rather than focus mainly on intervening in a crisis, organizations and societies can rethink their operations to reduce participant pain and to increase coping resources. This helps everyone -- not just those who have reached a threshold where pain is very close to coping resources. Aggregate pain includes physical pain, emotional pain, and social pain. Reducing pain in any area by even a small amount may bring a person below a threshold for suicide. Similarly there are many types of coping resources from interacting with a friend, to going to a funny movie, to receiving adequate health care, to interacting with a pet. There are also some short-term coping strategies like denial or drinking which may have long-term negative consequences that become new sources of pain when done to excess.
As David Conroy says: "Suicide is not chosen; it happens when pain exceeds resources for coping with pain. That's all it's about. You are not a bad person, or crazy, or weak, or flawed, because you feel suicidal. It doesn't even mean that you really want to die - it only means that you have more pain than you can cope with right now. If I start piling weights on your shoulders, you will eventually collapse if I add enough weights... no matter how much you want to remain standing. Willpower has nothing to do with it. Of course you would cheer yourself up, if you could. Don't accept it if someone tells you, "That's not enough to be suicidal about." There are many kinds of pain that may lead to suicide. Whether or not the pain is bearable may differ from person to person. What might be bearable to someone else, may not be bearable to you. The point at which the pain becomes unbearable depends on what kinds of coping resources you have. Individuals vary greatly in their capacity to withstand pain. When pain exceeds pain-coping resources, suicidal feelings are the result. Suicide is neither wrong nor right; it is not a defect of character; it is morally neutral. It is simply an imbalance of pain versus coping resources. You can survive suicidal feelings if you do either of two things: (1) find a way to reduce your pain, or (2) find a way to increase your coping resources. Both are possible."
Better options are available than prescription drugs in almost all cases. Almost all psychiatric medicines are essentially placebos -- often with harmful side effects including psychosis and where treating side-effects lead to a treadmill of medications. See "Deadly Psychiatry and Organised Denial" by Peter C. Gøtzsche:
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/26214735-deadly-psychiatry-and-organised-denial [goodreads.com]
"Deadly Psychiatry and Organised Denial explains in evidence-based detail why the way we currently use psychiatric drugs does far more harm than good. Professor, Doctor of Medical Science, Peter C. Gøtzsche documents that psychiatric drugs kill more than half a million people every year among those aged 65 and above in the United States and Europe. This makes psychiatric drugs the third leading cause of death, after heart disease and cancer. Gøtzsche explains that we could reduce our current usage of psychotropic drugs by 98% and at the same time improve patients' mental and physical health and survival. It can be difficult, however, to come off the drugs, as many people become dependent on them. As the withdrawal symptoms can be severe, long-lasting and even dangerous, slow tapering is usually necessary. In his book, Gøtzsche debunks the many myths that leading psychiatrists - very often on drug industry payroll - have created and nurtured over decades in order to conceal the fact that biological psychiatry has generally been a failure. Biological psychiatry sees drugs as the "solution" for virtually all problems, in marked contrast to the patients' views. Most patients don't respond to the drugs they receive but, unfortunately, the psychiatrists' frustrations over the lack of progress often lead to more diagnoses, more drugs and higher doses, harming the patients further."
Good sleep is discussed in "Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams" by Matthew Walker. Essentially, the brain is overclocked during the day and needs good sleep to catch up on all the deferred maintenance. That needed daily maintenance by the brain when we sleep includes moving memories of the day to long-term storage (one phase of sleep), temporarily opening up physical channels for wastes to be flushed from brain cells (another phase of sleep), and processing emotionally-laden and potentially traumatic experiences in a way during REM sleep where we can learn from them and remember them without being emotionally overwhelmed by them. As you point out, we need all the several phases in some healthy balance.
Again, glad to hear you found ways to reduce you pain and/or increase your coping resources -- especially by getting better sleep. Thanks for telling your story as a hopeful example to help others.
The biggest challenge of the 21st century: the irony of technologies of abundance used by scarcity-minded people.