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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: 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.