I passionately hate that all of the mental health people are obligated by law to commit me to an asylum if they think I’m about to kill myself. They can’t be objective. You know, if they could talk to me without such stupid constraints, they might have prevented this very suicide.
This is a serious problem, but I should inform people that it’s not as much of a catch-22 as it sounds. A sane therapist can tell the difference between “I’m going to shoot myself tonight” and “I wish I were dead a lot of the time, but I know it would wreck my family if I went through with it,” and he won’t hospitalize the second person. It may take a little gentle probing to see if your therapist is sane, but such people do exist; it is possible to talk to someone even about very dark thoughts without being committed. If you’re very, very risk-averse about such things, there are suicide hotlines.
This is a serious problem, but I should inform people that it’s not as much of a catch-22 as it sounds. A sane therapist can tell the difference between “I’m going to shoot myself tonight” and “I wish I were dead a lot of the time, but I know it would wreck my family if I went through with it,” and he won’t hospitalize the second person. It may take a little gentle probing to see if your therapist is sane, but such people do exist; it is possible to talk to someone even about very dark thoughts without being committed. If you’re very, very risk-averse about such things, there are suicide hotlines.
Suicide hotline operators will sometimes call the police on you...