https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=QoZTww2xnbM
I almost committed suicide three years ago, but I did not jump. I’m better now. What would you tell someone who might currently be on the edge? Well, it’s hard to come up with generic advice for someone who’s desperate, you know, because there’s many pathways to desperation. But, you know, I had this crazy professor that I met at the University of Alberta when I was about 18. And he was quite the bizarre person. He vanished one day about 20 years later. He got on a bus in Winnipeg to go visit his family and never showed up, and they never found a trace of him. Anyways, at the University of Alberta, he worked as the psychologist at the Maximum Security Prison that was located nearby, and he took me out there a couple of times. And so that was quite the hair-raising experience. And I met some pretty serious psychopaths in the Edmonton Maximum Security Prison. And he was a funny guy. This Thauburger was his name. He used to give us multiple-choice tests. He did a course on creativity. And now and then he’d throw in a multiple-choice test question, and all four answers would be the same, which I thought was, I guess that was creative, and it was certainly funny, I thought. And, you know, some of the students really hated him, but I thought he was great. He was really cool. And what did he say about suicide? He can always do it tomorrow. Yeah. Well, you know, that’s pretty good. It’s pretty good. That’s a pretty good piece of advice. It’s like, you know, you don’t get to do it twice if you’re successful. So is it not possible just to wait? You know, can you just wait? And that’s pretty generic advice, but it’s definitely worth thinking about, you know, because it’s a final act. And I would say, too, let people around you know you don’t want to keep that a secret. And if you don’t have anyone to tell, really, it’s time to go to the hospital and tell someone. And you tell, when you go to the hospital, you say, I’m suicidal. I’m, and I have a plan, and here’s my plan. And that’s, by the way, how you assess someone for suicidality, you know, because depressed people, lots of people get depressed, will have suicidal thoughts, and they’re far from rare. And so then you might ask yourself, well, how do you know when someone’s suicidal? And they’re suicidal when they say to you, you say, well, are you, do you ever think self-destructive thoughts? And they say, you know, yeah, you know, in, well, in my father’s house, there’s a basement and there’s a pistol down there, and it’s in the top right-hand corner of the bureau. And I know the bullets for that gun are in the bottom left-hand drawer. And, you know, I’ve taken that gun out of that drawer and I’ve toyed with it. And I thought, you know, my parents are leaving next week for a weekend, and they won’t be back, and I could go into the bathroom and put the barrel in my mouth and end it. It’s like, that’s a suicidal person. And you know that because they’re not just being plagued by vague thoughts. They have a fully detailed implementable vision of their death, and that’s not good. And so if there’s anybody in the audience who has that sort of fully fleshed out fantasy, I would say, tell someone, you know, tell someone or more than one person. Tell the closest person you have to someone who cares, you know. And if you don’t have anybody to tell, then go to the hospital and tell them because the probability is pretty high if you’re suicidal that there’s actually something wrong with you, that you’re ill in some manner, you know, and maybe you’re depressed. But there’s a lot of reasons to be depressed. Sometimes you might be depressed because you just have a terrible life, and that’s very complicated. But sometimes you’re depressed because you have an immunological condition, an inflammatory condition, or, you know, you’re ill in some way that hasn’t been diagnosed, or you have seasonal affective disorder and your circadian rhythms are off. Like, there’s a lot of reasons that you can get desperate enough to be suicidally depressed. And there’s always the possibility that that can be fixed. And so and it’s tricky because when you’re depressed, you definitely think that the future is dismal. And, you know, the past is dismal and the present is unbearable and the future is definitely worse. And it’s all your fault besides. And that’s basically the depressive cloud. It affects everything. It’s very low level, profound, deep brain and psychic state. But it’s generally rectifiable. And, you know, since you can always do it tomorrow, you might as well run the whole gamut of treatments before you make the final decision. So that’s what I would tell people who are. Oh, and the other thing, too, you got to understand, too, about suicide is that if there are people around you that love you, it’s pretty likely that they’ll never really recover. And so, you know, you might be thinking that if you took yourself out, you’d be doing the people around you a favor. But and often people who are depressed, they really believe that. But. You know, I’ve had lots of clients who were pretty damn traumatized by a familial suicide, and they just torture themselves for the rest of their life, thinking, you know, what if? Well, I had one client, for example, one of her relative committed suicide an hour after she missed a phone call from him. It’s like, how the hell do you recover from that? You know, because you just think, well, you know, if I would have just been there and then you don’t you can’t talk to the person about it, there’s no real way of rectifying that. You just live with that guilt. And it’s it’s pretty damn awful thing. That’s why most societies regard suicide as a crime, you know, because you leave an aftermath of catastrophic destruction in your wake. And. That’s also not a good thing. So, you know, if you’re depressed, you’re going to think it’s going to be better for everyone else if you’re just gone. But generally, that’s far from the truth. Almost inevitably, it’s far from the truth. So those are some things you need to know on the suicide analysis and prevention front.