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https://forum.questionablequesting.com/threads/on-suicide-and-depression.3375/

Someone (presumably a mod) added a reply banner. It's mealy-mouthed shit that's just depressing to read. Everywhere says that crap and it discourages people from speaking frankly and getting things off their chest. Nobody's going to listen to that kind of boilerplate - especially when it's so blatantly obvious that it is impersonal boilerplate.

It's counterproductive claptrap that's going to be a net harm. Please remove it. This is a request as thread OP and as a former attempted suicide.

(I am willing to put the link in a threadmark, as it is potentially useful to someone who wants it. But that thread banner is not okay.)

 

I personally think that the banner is ok, but then again, I don’t suffer from depression, or have suicidal tendencies. In this case, I think it is best to listen to you then.

 

Like, it's often decent advice, but it's advice that's pretty much at saturation, and it's in just about the worst possible place - completely impersonal, completely free of context, and directly in your face while you're trying to pour your heart out.

As I said, the link is absolutely useful to have on hand and threadmarked for people who want professional help, but "if you are suicidal, don't talk to us, talk to the people whom you are afraid of talking to in case they throw you in the looney bin" is... not exactly uplifting or likely to help.

 

A couple of things:

The link doesn’t work (on mobile).

If you want to link to resources, couldn’t you just have a threadmarked post you can link to in the banner like so-

Helpful resources

-which you can add to* as you see fit. That’d be less distracting when people want to post, while still providing a direction to anyone who is receptive to that kind of thing.

Like, most people probably already know about hotlines and what have you, so they’d be posting on QQ because they trust and feel comfortable on QQ; directing them to a completely different venue before they can speak, even with the best of intentions, seems counterproductive.



*That opens up the possibility of actually describing what you’re linking to without the limited space, and maybe addressing concerns people have that may or may not be unfounded. Fear of the unknown is pretty notorious.

 

Yeah, working now.

 

I have made a suggestion that would be diligent without being counterproductive.

 

Okay, so. I was probably a bit aggressive in my OP because I was highly upset. Let me take it from the top.



There is stigma and fear regarding approaching psychological practitioners or helplines about depression (or a few other things, especially psychosis). People who have not had experience of those professions, and even some people with limited experience, are afraid of being committed and/or being nonconsensually medicated (particularly relevant given permanent side effects of some psychiatric drugs) and/or being shot by trigger-happy police and/or being blacklisted from jobs. Some of these worries are even well-founded, because national practices, individual practitioners, and the mentally ill all vary. I've been committed myself following a suicide attempt, and I happen to know from that experience and from osmosis that the simple logistics of hospitals being overtaxed keeps involuntary admissions rare and short, but this isn't common knowledge - and some of the other issues are real, if perhaps overblown and/or dependent on one's location.

There are a few main categories of people who are likely to vent about depression on a public, anonymous, non-professional venue:

1) People who are afraid of engaging with the psychological system for the above reasons,
2) People who cannot access the psychological system for financial, logistical or other reasons,
3) People who are already accessing the psychological system, but feel like speaking about it elsewhere as well.
(There is theoretically a #4, "people who don't know the system exists or any way to access it", but these are rare nowadays and particularly so among forum-goers.)

#1 generally could use a push toward the system - this is true. The problem is that boilerplate about "take it to the professionals if you are thinking about harming yourself or someone else" doesn't necessarily address their concerns. Someone who thinks "if I call a hotline saying I'm thinking about killing myself, they'll call the police based off tracing my number and the police will shoot me" - for the record, this exact situation has actually happened in the USA - needs a rather more elaborate breakdown of what risks are and are not real and what the safest methods are to make contact with the system.

#2 and #3, on the other hand, derive no benefit from being informed the system exists. They know.

And meanwhile, the placement of that text is confronting to all three categories. It's phrased in a way that seems hostile, dismissive, and critical toward people who want to pour their hearts out, even though it's probably not intended as such.

As I have said, I agree that having a link to system resources easily available in the thread is a good idea. My objection is to forcing literally everyone, in all of those categories, to read that text every time they post in the thread. I do not believe that this is in the best interests of the thread's participants, and I do not believe that a threadmark - indeed, the only threadmark in the thread - would be insufficient to do what good it can.

I was and am especially upset due to my own association with the thread as OP. I feel responsible for what comes of the thread I made, and my pseudonym is what people see when they're browsing Rants. It is deeply distressing to me to have something tied to me be used in ways I believe harmful; to borrow a vulgar metaphor, it's as though someone's lecturing me out of my own arse. I also tend to get a bit prickly regarding apparently-bureaucratic things in general (and am more broadly kind of abrasive); that's mea culpa and I apologise if I overstepped.

As such, I am begging you to reconsider on this. I'm quite willing to compromise and to advise on this, but I can't just let it be as-is; it's been most of what I can think about since I first saw it.

TotalAbsolutism alethiophile tehelgee