That the mental health system in the US is fundamentally broken due to the general attitude toward suicidality. As I understand it, the general and medical view of suicidality is that suicide cannot be allowed under any circumstances. Anyone acting in ways that seem like they could realistically lead to suicide must be stopped, by force if necessary. To this end, not only is it considered morally correct to report suicidal people to the proper authorities, but it is actually mandated in many cases.

This seems perfectly reasonable from the perspective of most people - suicide wreaks terrible havoc on the lives of the people around the victim, after all, on top of the general loss of life. This holds especially true because most suicide attempts are spur-of-the-moment decisions that have not been thought through, and these cases have a very good chance of recovery if they are talked down. As far as I am aware, the majority of people who have been brought back from suicide attempts are grateful for the second chance.

But this leaves a rather large class of people behind, who are in such anguish for one reason or another that suicide seems like the only option. These are not people who kill themselves on a whim - they are people who have considered the ramifications of such an action for sometimes decades. If one of these people determines that suicide is the right choice, this essentially traps them in a space where they can no longer be helped. They cannot reach out to literally anyone, because everyone from their therapist to their friends to their relatives are likely to call in an intervention and involuntarily imprison them in a psychiatric ward. And even worse - these people do this in a genuine attempt to help, completely unaware of the paradox this creates.

To someone of this mindset, evoking an intervention of that nature is simply not an option. If one is in such pain that suicide seems like the only escape, then removing that escape is by definition worse than a death sentence. It seems a special kind of cruelty, the last remaining thing the world can do to ensure you feel every last second of this pain it has in store for you. To these people, their autonomy is often the very last thing they have left, and it is incredibly precious.

And so, the only route left is to suffer in silence, slowly regressing until the day they actually kill themselves. After a certain threshold where speaking about their mental state risks imprisonment, they are effectively already lost - because even if something could still be done to help them, the perceived risk is too high to ever reach for it.

I was in such a state for many years, and was lucky enough to be able to return on my own to a level where I feel ‘eligible for mental help’ again. However, I feel as if most people who reach that level are not so fortunate, and it twists my heart to know what we are inadvertently inflicting upon these poor, invisible people. There has to be a better way to approach this.