7 ms·

Hundreds of suicidal teens sleep in emergency rooms

72 points by Victerius 4y ago

Overtonwindow 4y ago
https://archive.ph/lxH0O https://archive.ph/lxH0O
oneoff786 4y ago
> But I need to be honest with you about what’s likely to unfold,” the doctor added. The best place for adolescents in distress was not a hospital but an inpatient treatment center, where individual and group therapy would be provided in a calmer, communal setting, to stabilize the teens and ease them back to real life. But there were no openings in any of the treatment centers in the region, the doctor said. This is never really questioned. I have some doubts. Seems to me you’re more likely to see success with a radical life change. Moving far away to a different lifestyle. Managing to prevent a suicidal person from committing suicide is a pretty weak target metric imo. How many suicidal people are suicidal simply because the specific lifestyle before them is the only norm they know of and they just don’t want it? Many people cite stats about how previously suicidal people are glad they didn’t commit suicide successfully but it’s got obvious survivor bias from those that did and don’t get a say.
- oneplane 4y ago
  That is one of the metric problems (both metrics on 'prevention' and survivor bias) which really don't actually help prevention nor does it actually provide usable information. Prevention is not possible in some cases (sometimes genetic or traumatic origin for example), but the root cause is generally a combination of environmental context and vulnerability. If you live in a culture where taboos and other people telling you what you can or can't do in your personal life are part of daily life, a lot of avenues of support (and by extension, prevention) become unavailable. That applies to much tighter scopes like family and much broader scope like city or national levels all the same.
- theobeers 4y ago
  They go through a little timeline at the end of the article, re: the 15-year-old girl, G. - She spends over a week in the emergency dept. at Boston Children's. - A bed opens up in the hospital proper; she spends another ~3 weeks there. - She moves to an inpatient treatment center (of the kind advocated by the doctor quoted above), spends a week there, and doesn't find it very helpful. - She returns home and spends the summer working at a fast-food place; she still self-harms but manages to hide it for a while. - In the fall, suicidal again (or perhaps she always was), she returns to the inpatient facility for two more weeks, then transitions into an outpatient program. - She's still having a hard time, so she goes to a different hospital and stays for three weeks. By now it's mid October 2021 (iiuc); her initial visit to Boston Children's was in late April. - The last update is that she continues to self-harm, has gotten better at hiding it, and has learned not to admit to adults that she's suicidal. Pretty f'ing bleak! Not that I would have any idea who or what to blame in such a situation. The silver lining is that this person is still alive, a year after the first hospitalization.
  - codingdave 4y ago
    That is one story. There are others where it does work out, and learning some coping skills from inpatient was the start of healing. There are yet other stories where the inpatient program identifies a medical problem underlying the suicidal thoughts and they get on meds, figure out how to cope, and end up living a productive life. Our system does work for some people. But it is frustrating and fails others. If anyone wants to build a better one, please do. We need more answers, more options, and more help. ERs are definitely not the answer. The fact that a local family doc can fly someone to a trauma center on a helicopter for a life-threatening physical problem in a matter of minutes, while an equally life-threatening mental problem requires weeks or months of wait lists is a huge freaking problem. We absolutely should be looking for better answers. In the meantime, we do the best we can with what we have to try to save the lives of our children. We all hope for something better in the long run, but I at least appreciate that articles like this are exposing the problems.
    - pmoriarty 4y ago
      "Our system does work for some people. But it is frustrating and fails others. If anyone wants to build a better one, please do." I don't know how we can achieve it, but we somehow need to get to a society which each individual cares for and engages with people in need, and not just wish them away to some system which is supposed to substitute for our own caring and engagement.
- nullc 4y ago
  > Many people cite stats about how previously suicidal people are glad they didn’t commit suicide successfully but it’s got obvious survivor bias from those that did and don’t get a say. It's pretty much tautological, no? Either you're (still) suicidal or you're glad you didn't previously commit suicide. > How many suicidal people are suicidal simply because the specific lifestyle before them is the only norm they know of and they just don’t want it? Perhaps there is a philosophical challenge in the standard definitions of mental illness, which more or less amount to "thinking in a manner which causes distress or impairs your functioning". We like to pretend that ordinary people ought to have the fortitude to face whatever adversity comes their way-- a belief that is easier to sustain for those who aren't currently facing great adversity.
- pmoriarty 4y ago
  "Seems to me you’re more likely to see success with a radical life change. Moving far away to a different lifestyle." I'm not so sure. People tend to take their problems with them. Changing external circumstances may help some, but even then the improvement tends to be short-lived until their demons come back to haunt them. Severe depression is rarely so easily cured. "Many people cite stats about how previously suicidal people are glad they didn’t commit suicide successfully but it’s got obvious survivor bias from those that did and don’t get a say." I've never attempted suicide (and if I ever did I'd make sure to succeed), but have felt suicidal throughout most of my life. Am I glad I never did it? Only to the extent that I'm glad I didn't traumatize or ruin the lives of people who care about me. If it wasn't for my reluctance to indirectly hurt people who care about me I'd be gone long ago. Best for me is to have never been born at all. I think a lot of people are only alive because they don't want to hurt people close to them. I very much doubt a failed suicide attempt would change my mind on any of this. It would just have led to more misery for me and the people who care about me. I've seen interviews with suicide survivors who regret trying, and they've tended to be people who just acted impulsively and didn't think through the consequences (teens are a prime example of this). People like me who've thought carefully about it for years or decades are unlikely to fail and unlikely to be glad they survived if they somehow fail anyway.
  - wintermutestwin 4y ago
    >People tend to take their problems with them. Changing external circumstances may help some, but even then the improvement tends to be short-lived until their demons come back to haunt them. Severe depression is rarely so easily cured. The context here is teens. Of course the majority of them have underlying "demons," but combining that with the bleak realities of having to decide what to do with your adult life while having drastically limited perspective on your choices is a huge trapdoor that needs to be avoided before they can get to higher levels of self repair.
  - mdp2021 4y ago
    > Changing external circumstances may help some, but even then No, it really must depend on what makes one suicidal. A cannot bear his environment, B is afflicted with a chronic pain, C practices inadequate self management, D relives traumas, etc.: if A improves diet, starts to exercise, solves the nuisance of a bad back and hindered sleep, then his situation will improve and yet he will go on hating his life after his own environment - but if A finds an environment that matches his personality and aspirations, he will probably be "happy" (literally - living the fortunate occurrence) even in spite of bearing other "nuisances". It does not seem logical otherwise. It should probably be noted ("just to be sure" in terms of communication) that a number of those conditions may not have a practically easy solution. Also, that an absolute condition of suicidal tendency is not the only cause for suicide.
- wintermutestwin 4y ago
  >How many suicidal people are suicidal simply because the specific lifestyle before them is the only norm they know of and they just don’t want it? As someone with a lot of experience of teens in crisis, this is the most prevalent underlying theme. Radical broadening of perspective is indeed the solution, but it is a pretty complex thing to achieve in a system that is underfunded and built to allow parents and overarching social structures to avoid taking responsibility.
- newsclues 4y ago
  I started increasing animal fat in my diet and my thoughts of suicide subsided and come back after a few weeks of no animal fat. I’ve cycled through many antidepressants and people to talk to, but my doctors and therapists don’t seem to know or be interested that diet may impact mental health. PS: Duck fat is delicious to fry potatoes with.
  - octopoc 4y ago
    Yeah I had a similar situation. I had issues with depression for a few years (starting very gradually) and then found out that I had an infection in my mouth. After that was taken care of I felt sooo much better it was amazing.
    - mdp2021 4y ago
      I find these posts important on many points. -- The importance of the impact of non-evident factors bringing unwellness; -- Individual difficulties in assessing sources for unwellness and identifying them; -- A widespread disregard for subtleties as an ever-increasing mark in societies. This ever-spreading construct that one can disregard and overcome any stimulus, so people can just live under any condition, which could be dismissed as unimportant (to the point of seeing large masses of people utterly oblivious to all feedback). While others were educated on keeping subtleties in the highest regard...
  - pmoriarty 4y ago
    Vitamin B12 and Vitamin D helped with my depression, and gave me more energy. Exercise really helped with my mood, gave me more energey, and helped me destress as well. People's bodies differ, and they may have different nutrient deficiencies/overdoses depending on what they eat and how they live their life (most obviously, those who don't get much sun are more likely to lack vitamin D). Everyone who suffers from depression should definitely take a hard look at their diet and at whether they have some nutritional deficiency or imbalance, and see if they can get more exercise and sunlight, to start with. Of course therapy with a respected therapist you like and trust can be helpful too.. and medication helps some people, though personally I view it as more of a bandaid that only treats symptoms and not the underlying cause.
- sandworm101 4y ago
  >> Managing to prevent a suicidal person from committing suicide is a pretty weak target metric imo. But that is 100% of the job of an emergency room. They aren't there to save a life. They are there to stabilize a situation, to keep people alive for a few hours/days until they can be triaged and moved on to other facilities. So I would not expect anything more from an ER beyond the simple metric of the person remaining alive through the night. Long term solutions are not their department.
  - oneoff786 4y ago
    This answer assumes that the ER room is an appropriate place for a suicidal person to go. It is not. So an ER room’s metric mentality is irrelevant.
    - sandworm101 4y ago
      It is a better place than a bridge. A person about to kill themselves is a person in a medical crisis. When in a crisis an ER is a reasonable choice. So too might be a police station, but an ER is better than many alternatives.
      - oneoff786 4y ago
        That’s a hell of a strawman. And fallacious reasoning on top of it. ER’s are good for some crises, and suicidal inclinations are a crisis, ergo ER is good for suicidal inclinations? No. That’s not logical.
- 8bitsrule 4y ago
  > Moving ... to a different lifestyle. When environment is part of the problem, The idea of returning to an unchanged situation seems unlikely to be productive. A couple of thoughts: Most adolescents need to find a 'peer group' to be part of on the path to independent adulthood. Easy for some; hard for others. I recall a high school student who was having problems and who moved to another ('alternative') school in a different part of the country for a year. There they found a very supportive peer group. When they returned to the original school as a senior, the problems were gone. The school hadn't changed ... their perspective had. I recall from history that a good many 'notable' historical figures left home in their early teens. They were perhaps one-in-a-hundred who are remembered ... not at all uncommon in the past. Were those times more dangerous? One of my grandparents was 16yo when they left behind family and friends in Europe to sail to the US. Another, 16yo grandparent left rural Canada behind to grow-up in the US. (Both joined friends/relatives.) Are these options legal now? Are we 'trapping' our action-seeking/outsider teens? Is 'therapy' another name for 'my way or the highway'?
_trampeltier 4y ago
In Switzerland we have about 3 suicide per 1 death on the street. While there are a lot of regulations to make the street safer, I don't know any program to lower the suicide rate. Also in media, deaths on the street are covered well in media. About suicide, you hear just in media, if it was somebody famous.
- caddemon 4y ago
  Media coverage of suicides is a tricky topic, I know there is worry about a potential copy cat effect. Actually when I went to look for more detail about this, it seems that Switzerland specifically has had intentional campaigns to influence media coverage of suicides because of this: https://jech.bmj.com/content/57/4/238 https://jech.bmj.com/content/57/4/238
- tux1968 4y ago
  While a taboo and difficult subject, many suicides are medically supported. It's an unfortunate reality that sometimes suicide is the most humane decision someone can make for themselves. All I'm really saying is that your 3 for 1 statistic, may be counting suicides in Switzerland that nobody is trying to prevent, and are instead actually facilitating: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euthanasia_in_Switzerland https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euthanasia_in_Switzerland
  - smoldesu 4y ago
    There's a good chance that metric is so high because they're one of the only countries that doesn't prosecute assisted euthanasia.
    - ta8645 4y ago
      They're more progressive about admitting it and having metrics for it. But it goes on to varying degrees everywhere, with doctors leaving patients in charge of their own unregulated morphine drip, etc. And everyone turns a blind eye, because it's seen as a reasonable and humane thing to do.
  - 4y ago
Layke1123 4y ago
The reality is that most people get depressed because of the environment we are in. Modern US life is killing us because of a lot of factors people don't want to admit as the problem. Economics, racism, religion, etc. The US has been and continues to be a brutal regime, and everyone on this site pretends it isn't because that's the false narrative you want to believe.
- walkhour 4y ago
  > Economics, racism, religion Are you aware that a whole swath of society blames the current problems on over regulation of the economy, obsession over race and lack of religion. Both sides are not able to convince the other, which means we actually don't know how to solve this and the proposed solutions go in opposite directions, that is, every side claims the solutions of the other are actually detrimental. How do you know you're right? > US has been and continues to be a brutal regime, and everyone on this site pretends it isn't because that's the false narrative you want to believe. In comparison to what other regimes? Are the fifty million immigrants in USA and the hundreds of millions that want to come to come to USA also pretending?
  - Layke1123 4y ago
    I know I'm right because if these were the cure to society, religion would be growing, not shrinking, regulation would be decreasing, not increasing, and racial tensions would be decreasing, not increasing. How else do you explain the trends? Revolutions don't happen because things are working. They happen because things ARE NOT working. If America was mecca, we wouldn't be in this situation where thousands of teens are suicidal. Why does it have to be in comparison? I don't have to say, well at least I'm better than that guy and pretend thats good enough. There could be serious flaws with myself that I should acknowledge could be way better than turning and pointing a finger at others. And talking to those immigrants, the impression I have always gathered is that they don't believe the US is better, but that they have no alternatives where they come from. Lots of people immigrate to whatever country they can get to. If you sum up all immigration to Europe, you suddenly see that the US isn't quite the leader you think it is.
snvzz 4y ago
>“Once people ask you a question, ‘Do you feel suicidal,’ you have to say nope,” she said. “You can’t tell them anything or they’ll send you to the hospital.” Quite the way to conclude the article.
- deleted 4y ago
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actfrench 4y ago
I was a tutor for 20 years and now run an edtech company. Teens are often given 4-6 hours of homework a night and are under constant pressure to perform on quizzes and tests or fail out of school. Instead of teaching the material well in class, they are expected to do the studying outside of school. The whole system is designed to prepare them to do well on exams so that they can either enter an Ivy League School (private school) or do well on a standardized test (public school). Their success is measured by grades (A,B,C,D,F) Often they are so afraid of failure that they underperform on these tests. This performance anxiety gets passed along to parents as well. I've seen extremely successful CEO's in a state of total panic about how their children will perform on the SAT - and this panic is infections - it gets passed along to the children. The irony is that the name of your school has very little to do with how good the teachers are or how much you'll learn there. The consequence too is that deep learning rarely happens. Kids learn enough math to pass a test, but don't develop a sense of creative problem solving. They learn enough French to pass a grammar quiz or an AP exam, but not to converse with a person in France. School has become a place that is not focused on learning, but performing, and often performing well according to arbitrary standards. My current focus is on helping families opt out and design their children's education through modular learning (homeschool 2.0), not going to school from 9-3, but through a mosaic of educational, social and childcare experiences: community classes, meetups, learning apps, books, online classes, tutors, apprenticeships. The assessment and accountability is available through incredible tools like CoGat, MobyMax or just assessments built into mastery-based, adaptive learning apps. People often say, but how do kids socialize? Won't they get isolated and depressed? The irony here is when you read an article like this and see how depressed kids currently are IN SCHOOl. School is a socially engineered environment. Kids sit in classes of other kids the same age and stress out about how to do on tests. They have little time for real socialization because they are overburdened with homework. They have no time for plan and relaxation (recess only being 30 minutes a day) They don't get enough sleep and they don't have time to reflect or study the topics that interest them independently or do outside projects. Often they are also overloaded with extracurriculars like gymnastics and piano that they have to take outside of school because it's not available in school. These extracurriculars are often part and parcel of the big game plan to get them into college and add even more stress. For example, practicing an hour of piano a day outside of lessons to prepare for competitions. kids whose bodies are not designed to sit still 6 hours a day are given ritalin to force them to conform to an unnatural system when they would learn so much better if they had the freedom to move around. It's decided something is wrong with them because they need to move their bodies. Schools develop clicks and often kids who feel isolated join groups that revolve around experimenting with drugs or alcohol, the only groups within they feel included. The children doing modular learning (homeschool 2.0) get to design their own social experiences. If they are in an urban environment, or even a rural one, this can be working on projects together, going on field trips, 9th graders mentoring 1st graders and teaching them to read, playing at the beach. These kids have busy, full social lives that often include groups that meet with parents and grandparents as well. Kids aren't separated from adults all day. They get to learn from older kids and mentor younger children. Their aren't these exclusive clicks and bullying we see in private and public school. And last but certainly not least, they get to sleep in! Teenagers bodies are not designed to get up at 6am every day for school. They need lots of lovely sleep to be healthy! This is kind of a rant, but it's so clear to me that this entire system is set up to produce huge stress and anxiety for kids, with very few tangible benefits to their well being. Our teens are depressed. They are suffering. But there is another way. It doesn't have to be like this for them to have succeed and have rich, meaningful lives right now. BTW Social media and the impact it has on children is a whole other topic, but a big piece of this.

72 points by Victerius 4y ago

https://archive.ph/lxH0O https://archive.ph/lxH0O

> But I need to be honest with you about what’s likely to unfold,” the doctor added. The best place for adolescents in distress was not a hospital but an inpatient treatment center, where individual and group therapy would be provided in a calmer, communal setting, to stabilize the teens and ease them back to real life. But there were no openings in any of the treatment centers in the region, the doctor said. This is never really questioned. I have some doubts. Seems to me you’re more likely to see success with a radical life change. Moving far away to a different lifestyle. Managing to prevent a suicidal person from committing suicide is a pretty weak target metric imo. How many suicidal people are suicidal simply because the specific lifestyle before them is the only norm they know of and they just don’t want it? Many people cite stats about how previously suicidal people are glad they didn’t commit suicide successfully but it’s got obvious survivor bias from those that did and don’t get a say.

oneplane 4y ago
That is one of the metric problems (both metrics on 'prevention' and survivor bias) which really don't actually help prevention nor does it actually provide usable information. Prevention is not possible in some cases (sometimes genetic or traumatic origin for example), but the root cause is generally a combination of environmental context and vulnerability. If you live in a culture where taboos and other people telling you what you can or can't do in your personal life are part of daily life, a lot of avenues of support (and by extension, prevention) become unavailable. That applies to much tighter scopes like family and much broader scope like city or national levels all the same.
theobeers 4y ago
They go through a little timeline at the end of the article, re: the 15-year-old girl, G. - She spends over a week in the emergency dept. at Boston Children's. - A bed opens up in the hospital proper; she spends another ~3 weeks there. - She moves to an inpatient treatment center (of the kind advocated by the doctor quoted above), spends a week there, and doesn't find it very helpful. - She returns home and spends the summer working at a fast-food place; she still self-harms but manages to hide it for a while. - In the fall, suicidal again (or perhaps she always was), she returns to the inpatient facility for two more weeks, then transitions into an outpatient program. - She's still having a hard time, so she goes to a different hospital and stays for three weeks. By now it's mid October 2021 (iiuc); her initial visit to Boston Children's was in late April. - The last update is that she continues to self-harm, has gotten better at hiding it, and has learned not to admit to adults that she's suicidal. Pretty f'ing bleak! Not that I would have any idea who or what to blame in such a situation. The silver lining is that this person is still alive, a year after the first hospitalization.
- codingdave 4y ago
  That is one story. There are others where it does work out, and learning some coping skills from inpatient was the start of healing. There are yet other stories where the inpatient program identifies a medical problem underlying the suicidal thoughts and they get on meds, figure out how to cope, and end up living a productive life. Our system does work for some people. But it is frustrating and fails others. If anyone wants to build a better one, please do. We need more answers, more options, and more help. ERs are definitely not the answer. The fact that a local family doc can fly someone to a trauma center on a helicopter for a life-threatening physical problem in a matter of minutes, while an equally life-threatening mental problem requires weeks or months of wait lists is a huge freaking problem. We absolutely should be looking for better answers. In the meantime, we do the best we can with what we have to try to save the lives of our children. We all hope for something better in the long run, but I at least appreciate that articles like this are exposing the problems.
  - pmoriarty 4y ago
    "Our system does work for some people. But it is frustrating and fails others. If anyone wants to build a better one, please do." I don't know how we can achieve it, but we somehow need to get to a society which each individual cares for and engages with people in need, and not just wish them away to some system which is supposed to substitute for our own caring and engagement.
nullc 4y ago
> Many people cite stats about how previously suicidal people are glad they didn’t commit suicide successfully but it’s got obvious survivor bias from those that did and don’t get a say. It's pretty much tautological, no? Either you're (still) suicidal or you're glad you didn't previously commit suicide. > How many suicidal people are suicidal simply because the specific lifestyle before them is the only norm they know of and they just don’t want it? Perhaps there is a philosophical challenge in the standard definitions of mental illness, which more or less amount to "thinking in a manner which causes distress or impairs your functioning". We like to pretend that ordinary people ought to have the fortitude to face whatever adversity comes their way-- a belief that is easier to sustain for those who aren't currently facing great adversity.
pmoriarty 4y ago
"Seems to me you’re more likely to see success with a radical life change. Moving far away to a different lifestyle." I'm not so sure. People tend to take their problems with them. Changing external circumstances may help some, but even then the improvement tends to be short-lived until their demons come back to haunt them. Severe depression is rarely so easily cured. "Many people cite stats about how previously suicidal people are glad they didn’t commit suicide successfully but it’s got obvious survivor bias from those that did and don’t get a say." I've never attempted suicide (and if I ever did I'd make sure to succeed), but have felt suicidal throughout most of my life. Am I glad I never did it? Only to the extent that I'm glad I didn't traumatize or ruin the lives of people who care about me. If it wasn't for my reluctance to indirectly hurt people who care about me I'd be gone long ago. Best for me is to have never been born at all. I think a lot of people are only alive because they don't want to hurt people close to them. I very much doubt a failed suicide attempt would change my mind on any of this. It would just have led to more misery for me and the people who care about me. I've seen interviews with suicide survivors who regret trying, and they've tended to be people who just acted impulsively and didn't think through the consequences (teens are a prime example of this). People like me who've thought carefully about it for years or decades are unlikely to fail and unlikely to be glad they survived if they somehow fail anyway.
- wintermutestwin 4y ago
  >People tend to take their problems with them. Changing external circumstances may help some, but even then the improvement tends to be short-lived until their demons come back to haunt them. Severe depression is rarely so easily cured. The context here is teens. Of course the majority of them have underlying "demons," but combining that with the bleak realities of having to decide what to do with your adult life while having drastically limited perspective on your choices is a huge trapdoor that needs to be avoided before they can get to higher levels of self repair.
- mdp2021 4y ago
  > Changing external circumstances may help some, but even then No, it really must depend on what makes one suicidal. A cannot bear his environment, B is afflicted with a chronic pain, C practices inadequate self management, D relives traumas, etc.: if A improves diet, starts to exercise, solves the nuisance of a bad back and hindered sleep, then his situation will improve and yet he will go on hating his life after his own environment - but if A finds an environment that matches his personality and aspirations, he will probably be "happy" (literally - living the fortunate occurrence) even in spite of bearing other "nuisances". It does not seem logical otherwise. It should probably be noted ("just to be sure" in terms of communication) that a number of those conditions may not have a practically easy solution. Also, that an absolute condition of suicidal tendency is not the only cause for suicide.
wintermutestwin 4y ago
>How many suicidal people are suicidal simply because the specific lifestyle before them is the only norm they know of and they just don’t want it? As someone with a lot of experience of teens in crisis, this is the most prevalent underlying theme. Radical broadening of perspective is indeed the solution, but it is a pretty complex thing to achieve in a system that is underfunded and built to allow parents and overarching social structures to avoid taking responsibility.
newsclues 4y ago
I started increasing animal fat in my diet and my thoughts of suicide subsided and come back after a few weeks of no animal fat. I’ve cycled through many antidepressants and people to talk to, but my doctors and therapists don’t seem to know or be interested that diet may impact mental health. PS: Duck fat is delicious to fry potatoes with.
- octopoc 4y ago
  Yeah I had a similar situation. I had issues with depression for a few years (starting very gradually) and then found out that I had an infection in my mouth. After that was taken care of I felt sooo much better it was amazing.
  - mdp2021 4y ago
    I find these posts important on many points. -- The importance of the impact of non-evident factors bringing unwellness; -- Individual difficulties in assessing sources for unwellness and identifying them; -- A widespread disregard for subtleties as an ever-increasing mark in societies. This ever-spreading construct that one can disregard and overcome any stimulus, so people can just live under any condition, which could be dismissed as unimportant (to the point of seeing large masses of people utterly oblivious to all feedback). While others were educated on keeping subtleties in the highest regard...
- pmoriarty 4y ago
  Vitamin B12 and Vitamin D helped with my depression, and gave me more energy. Exercise really helped with my mood, gave me more energey, and helped me destress as well. People's bodies differ, and they may have different nutrient deficiencies/overdoses depending on what they eat and how they live their life (most obviously, those who don't get much sun are more likely to lack vitamin D). Everyone who suffers from depression should definitely take a hard look at their diet and at whether they have some nutritional deficiency or imbalance, and see if they can get more exercise and sunlight, to start with. Of course therapy with a respected therapist you like and trust can be helpful too.. and medication helps some people, though personally I view it as more of a bandaid that only treats symptoms and not the underlying cause.
sandworm101 4y ago
>> Managing to prevent a suicidal person from committing suicide is a pretty weak target metric imo. But that is 100% of the job of an emergency room. They aren't there to save a life. They are there to stabilize a situation, to keep people alive for a few hours/days until they can be triaged and moved on to other facilities. So I would not expect anything more from an ER beyond the simple metric of the person remaining alive through the night. Long term solutions are not their department.
- oneoff786 4y ago
  This answer assumes that the ER room is an appropriate place for a suicidal person to go. It is not. So an ER room’s metric mentality is irrelevant.
  - sandworm101 4y ago
    It is a better place than a bridge. A person about to kill themselves is a person in a medical crisis. When in a crisis an ER is a reasonable choice. So too might be a police station, but an ER is better than many alternatives.
    - oneoff786 4y ago
      That’s a hell of a strawman. And fallacious reasoning on top of it. ER’s are good for some crises, and suicidal inclinations are a crisis, ergo ER is good for suicidal inclinations? No. That’s not logical.
8bitsrule 4y ago
> Moving ... to a different lifestyle. When environment is part of the problem, The idea of returning to an unchanged situation seems unlikely to be productive. A couple of thoughts: Most adolescents need to find a 'peer group' to be part of on the path to independent adulthood. Easy for some; hard for others. I recall a high school student who was having problems and who moved to another ('alternative') school in a different part of the country for a year. There they found a very supportive peer group. When they returned to the original school as a senior, the problems were gone. The school hadn't changed ... their perspective had. I recall from history that a good many 'notable' historical figures left home in their early teens. They were perhaps one-in-a-hundred who are remembered ... not at all uncommon in the past. Were those times more dangerous? One of my grandparents was 16yo when they left behind family and friends in Europe to sail to the US. Another, 16yo grandparent left rural Canada behind to grow-up in the US. (Both joined friends/relatives.) Are these options legal now? Are we 'trapping' our action-seeking/outsider teens? Is 'therapy' another name for 'my way or the highway'?

_trampeltier 4y ago

In Switzerland we have about 3 suicide per 1 death on the street. While there are a lot of regulations to make the street safer, I don't know any program to lower the suicide rate. Also in media, deaths on the street are covered well in media. About suicide, you hear just in media, if it was somebody famous.

caddemon 4y ago
Media coverage of suicides is a tricky topic, I know there is worry about a potential copy cat effect. Actually when I went to look for more detail about this, it seems that Switzerland specifically has had intentional campaigns to influence media coverage of suicides because of this: https://jech.bmj.com/content/57/4/238 https://jech.bmj.com/content/57/4/238
tux1968 4y ago
While a taboo and difficult subject, many suicides are medically supported. It's an unfortunate reality that sometimes suicide is the most humane decision someone can make for themselves. All I'm really saying is that your 3 for 1 statistic, may be counting suicides in Switzerland that nobody is trying to prevent, and are instead actually facilitating: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euthanasia_in_Switzerland https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euthanasia_in_Switzerland
- smoldesu 4y ago
  There's a good chance that metric is so high because they're one of the only countries that doesn't prosecute assisted euthanasia.
  - ta8645 4y ago
    They're more progressive about admitting it and having metrics for it. But it goes on to varying degrees everywhere, with doctors leaving patients in charge of their own unregulated morphine drip, etc. And everyone turns a blind eye, because it's seen as a reasonable and humane thing to do.
- 4y ago

Layke1123 4y ago

The reality is that most people get depressed because of the environment we are in. Modern US life is killing us because of a lot of factors people don't want to admit as the problem. Economics, racism, religion, etc. The US has been and continues to be a brutal regime, and everyone on this site pretends it isn't because that's the false narrative you want to believe.

walkhour 4y ago
> Economics, racism, religion Are you aware that a whole swath of society blames the current problems on over regulation of the economy, obsession over race and lack of religion. Both sides are not able to convince the other, which means we actually don't know how to solve this and the proposed solutions go in opposite directions, that is, every side claims the solutions of the other are actually detrimental. How do you know you're right? > US has been and continues to be a brutal regime, and everyone on this site pretends it isn't because that's the false narrative you want to believe. In comparison to what other regimes? Are the fifty million immigrants in USA and the hundreds of millions that want to come to come to USA also pretending?
- Layke1123 4y ago
  I know I'm right because if these were the cure to society, religion would be growing, not shrinking, regulation would be decreasing, not increasing, and racial tensions would be decreasing, not increasing. How else do you explain the trends? Revolutions don't happen because things are working. They happen because things ARE NOT working. If America was mecca, we wouldn't be in this situation where thousands of teens are suicidal. Why does it have to be in comparison? I don't have to say, well at least I'm better than that guy and pretend thats good enough. There could be serious flaws with myself that I should acknowledge could be way better than turning and pointing a finger at others. And talking to those immigrants, the impression I have always gathered is that they don't believe the US is better, but that they have no alternatives where they come from. Lots of people immigrate to whatever country they can get to. If you sum up all immigration to Europe, you suddenly see that the US isn't quite the leader you think it is.

snvzz 4y ago

>“Once people ask you a question, ‘Do you feel suicidal,’ you have to say nope,” she said. “You can’t tell them anything or they’ll send you to the hospital.” Quite the way to conclude the article.

deleted 4y ago
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actfrench 4y ago

I was a tutor for 20 years and now run an edtech company. Teens are often given 4-6 hours of homework a night and are under constant pressure to perform on quizzes and tests or fail out of school. Instead of teaching the material well in class, they are expected to do the studying outside of school. The whole system is designed to prepare them to do well on exams so that they can either enter an Ivy League School (private school) or do well on a standardized test (public school). Their success is measured by grades (A,B,C,D,F) Often they are so afraid of failure that they underperform on these tests. This performance anxiety gets passed along to parents as well. I've seen extremely successful CEO's in a state of total panic about how their children will perform on the SAT - and this panic is infections - it gets passed along to the children. The irony is that the name of your school has very little to do with how good the teachers are or how much you'll learn there. The consequence too is that deep learning rarely happens. Kids learn enough math to pass a test, but don't develop a sense of creative problem solving. They learn enough French to pass a grammar quiz or an AP exam, but not to converse with a person in France. School has become a place that is not focused on learning, but performing, and often performing well according to arbitrary standards. My current focus is on helping families opt out and design their children's education through modular learning (homeschool 2.0), not going to school from 9-3, but through a mosaic of educational, social and childcare experiences: community classes, meetups, learning apps, books, online classes, tutors, apprenticeships. The assessment and accountability is available through incredible tools like CoGat, MobyMax or just assessments built into mastery-based, adaptive learning apps. People often say, but how do kids socialize? Won't they get isolated and depressed? The irony here is when you read an article like this and see how depressed kids currently are IN SCHOOl. School is a socially engineered environment. Kids sit in classes of other kids the same age and stress out about how to do on tests. They have little time for real socialization because they are overburdened with homework. They have no time for plan and relaxation (recess only being 30 minutes a day) They don't get enough sleep and they don't have time to reflect or study the topics that interest them independently or do outside projects. Often they are also overloaded with extracurriculars like gymnastics and piano that they have to take outside of school because it's not available in school. These extracurriculars are often part and parcel of the big game plan to get them into college and add even more stress. For example, practicing an hour of piano a day outside of lessons to prepare for competitions. kids whose bodies are not designed to sit still 6 hours a day are given ritalin to force them to conform to an unnatural system when they would learn so much better if they had the freedom to move around. It's decided something is wrong with them because they need to move their bodies. Schools develop clicks and often kids who feel isolated join groups that revolve around experimenting with drugs or alcohol, the only groups within they feel included. The children doing modular learning (homeschool 2.0) get to design their own social experiences. If they are in an urban environment, or even a rural one, this can be working on projects together, going on field trips, 9th graders mentoring 1st graders and teaching them to read, playing at the beach. These kids have busy, full social lives that often include groups that meet with parents and grandparents as well. Kids aren't separated from adults all day. They get to learn from older kids and mentor younger children. Their aren't these exclusive clicks and bullying we see in private and public school. And last but certainly not least, they get to sleep in! Teenagers bodies are not designed to get up at 6am every day for school. They need lots of lovely sleep to be healthy! This is kind of a rant, but it's so clear to me that this entire system is set up to produce huge stress and anxiety for kids, with very few tangible benefits to their well being. Our teens are depressed. They are suffering. But there is another way. It doesn't have to be like this for them to have succeed and have rich, meaningful lives right now. BTW Social media and the impact it has on children is a whole other topic, but a big piece of this.