So. This is another heavy one. If that's not what you showed up for, then move along. :) Fair warning has been served.
This past Saturday, I co-facilitated a Mental Health First Aid course on the UT campus for (mostly) nursing students. I LOVE teaching this. The material is pretty straight-forward and therefore un-challenging, but I shine with public speaking. My co-facilitator was a lady whose primary job is to run around teaching suicide prevention trainings. CRINGE.
This is hard for me. It's always been hard, since my very beginnings in the field. It's unlovely on a general level, and it's grating for me on a personal level. It's HARD for me to deal with this. There is a FREAKING PROBLEM with suicide prevention, as a concept. As a theory. As a body of "knowledge." As an "intervention."As a training course (which I'm glad to say takes up very little real estate in the training I provide). And as a MESSAGE in general.
Because the message- and the problem [for they are one and the same]- is/are this: "it CAN be prevented. Utterly. Totally. And if someone completes suicide, then someone else failed at adequately utilizing 'preventative measures' to circumvent the act like they should have."
STOP.
FUCKING. STOP.
I've done a bazillion suicide interventions, and I'm good at them, and at this juncture, they're just sort of "all in a day's work." I don't mean for that to sound flippant, but it's the truth. I DO THIS. And largely, I feel like preventative interventions are [sort of] effective...up to the reaching of a certain and critical threshold. For most, there is a balancing-of-scales that's absolutely critical in the intervention process: the coexistence of "want-to" and "not-want-to," where the circumstantial redemption lies in helping them bulk more weight onto the "not-want-to" end of the scale. This is VERY possible if you've got a receptive audience. It's beautiful, even, to participate in that and feel the cosmic shift in another's soul.
But, the threshold. Everyone's got one.
I was 9 when I did my very first suicide intervention. "Daddy, do you want to kill yourself?" - "No, honey." -He did. -And, he did. I cannot imagine a more poignant 'preventative measure' than...ME. In his eyes. And it/I/that... was not enough, because he'd crossed the threshold. He, as a suffering human, was already gone. At that point, it was no longer preventable.
This is the problem. The quiet, indirect, and insidious implication that "it is ALWAYS preventable." That says that everyone who loves/loved that person, somehow failed at Suicide Prevention. NO.
I have seen- and responded to- someone who is honestly suicidal and no longer even asking for help, in my professional tenure. And I took action that effectively saved their life. And they're GOOD now. It's a harrowing thing- to feel, in your freaking bone marrow, that chilled and steeled certainty that This Person Is Done. It is, as an experience, solidly and viscerally different than a PRE-suicidal intervention. It's fucking CPR. It is literally a heartbeat that you're trying to dial a number faster than the time it needs to stop.
I'm glad she's alive. Glad I acted fast, and knew what I was looking at. I'm glad I survive my Daddy. Glad that these trainings exist, so that there's one more barrier on the way to the threshold. But I hate the name- "Suicide Prevention." As if. It should be called "Pre-Suicide Intervention Training," instead. That way, those of us who've lost...don't ever feel like it is implied that we failed. (Because we already do feel that way. And we can heal from it, but Suicide Prevention bullshit can really be exactly NOT the message we need. In the face of absolute and final loss, we don't need to be lectured about "could have." It's done- they're gone- and it CANNOT be my/our fault. It isn't and it never was.)
