September is suicide prevention month with the 10th being World Suicide Prevention Day. During this month people typically share numbers for crisis lines, reminders to check on one’s friends, and similar sentiments. While these are important messages, they barely touch the surface of real and meaningful suicide prevention strategies.
Like many things, suicidal ideation exists upon a spectrum from passive to active. Wherever someone finds themselves along this spectrum, the pain they are experiencing is real and deserving of support - although what this support looks like for each person will be entirely individual (even for the same person at different times in their life.)
Whether someone is experiencing passive or active suicidal ideation; whether these are experiences they live with or are encountering for the first time, people deserve the space to talk about their experiences without fear of judgment, stigmatization, and incarceration. The latter of which, a good deal of emerging research supports, can be more harmful than helpful.
Creating meaningful change for those experiencing a mental health crisis, living with mental illness and related struggles is complex and requires comprehensive prevention strategies and significant social and political change. If we want to truly see and participate in effective suicide prevention efforts, it requires us to be bold and reflective across multiple sectors of government and policy.
In my own journey, as somebody who lives with complex and interconnected mental illness including depression, I have said before that I do not have a neat and tidy narrative to offer. My depression ebbs and flows and I go through periods of intense lows that make this day quite relevant to me.
I’ll be quite blunt - people like me are walking pathologies more than we’re people in the eyes of the mental healthcare system. We’re “that person” - the problem child of psychiatry.
I say this as a privileged, white, middle class, healthcare literate, and “articulate” individual. I am by no means marginalized along many of the intersections of my identity. Nevertheless despite the many individuals within the mental healthcare system that I am incredibly grateful for, much of the trauma I’ve experienced in my life is from psychiatry and mental healthcare.
I don’t have words to describe the often dehumanizing, paternalistic, and traumatizing nature of forced psychiatric care other than to say it’s absurd - you are under arrest for being ill and anything you say can and will be used against you.
I can’t honestly stand here and say “reach out for help” from the system because I do not think acute psychiatric care services can help (at least in my experience).
That doesn’t mean I don’t utilize things like psychiatric medications, therapy, and outpatient services where these things are helpful, but I think hope in this realm lies outside of psychiatric and Western mental healthcare approaches (especially when it comes to acute care.)
For me, hope lies in community, peer support services, and anti-carceral care. That is what I trust in and will continue to invest in through advocacy and nursing work.
-S.
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