Every show with a suicide now has a disclaimer with a suicide hotline at the beginning. Is there any evidence that these warnings make a positive difference?
No. It it makes normies feel good for trying
I struggle with suicidal ideation problems. They have been so severe in the past that I almost went through it. While not all suicidal scenes trigger me, there are a few. And I have found that having the warnings help me from shutting off the TV and running off in a crying fit. I know it’s coming and can prepare myself. And knowing that the hotline is there has been one of the most comforting things I know of. I may have never called, but it’s there for when I can’t deal on my own. So yes, the warnings make a positive difference for me.
It’s amazing how effectively just hearing this from someone who has firsthand insight can put it in perspective.
And yet this thread is full of comments both confidently and cynically proclaiming that it’s totally useless and only there for the lawyers yada yada
I’m OK (now? currently? hopefully forever) but when I’m struggling I too appreciate the warning.
The worst about ideation for me is that a few days/weeks/months later, I’m almost always thinking “I was willing to do that? Because of XYZ? That would’ve been so fucking stupid!”
But in the moment your brain can just be like “topping yourself is clearly the only logical solution” and make you actually believe that shit.
It’s wild.
Sorry, I realise this is a bit off topic.
Funny the fictions we contrive for ourselves in our own heads.
There’s a real need to get ones world view/beliefs and the insecurities and inner critics in line in order to survive it seems.
That’s my latest conclusion, anyway. Distraction and drinking haven’t really helped. Shocking, I know…
I’ve said this elsewhere in the thread, but I have had suicidal ideation… ‘events’ as well, never called though. If you want someone to talk to (anyone else, too! yes, that means you, hi!), reach out and message me. I know this shit all too well and I don’t mind in the slightest, talking to someone who needs - or just wants - to communicate with someone who ‘gets it’.
No pressure, I just want to help others like myself.
It is well appreciated.
The national suicide prevention hotline is almost always too busy and callers often need to wait on hold. They’ve calibrated everything from the hold music, the script, and the recorded voice to keep callers on the line.
This factoid splits people pretty evenly between those who find it horrifying and those who find it hilarious.
I should say that according to the hotline, the changes made to the hold system has resulted in 100,000 fewer hang-ups per year.
Are you telling me they intentionally avoid playing Van Halen - Jump for anyone put on hold?
No, you see the trick is to play Jump by Van Halen exactly once at the right time followed immediately by Killing in the name of by Rage Against the Machine.
This combo is super effective… As long as the stay listen until the end.
The word hang up threw me off a little given the context
This is interesting. Source?
Suicides can be really easy to prevent.
Like, the hotline itself is incredibly effective, and reminding people it exists would naturally help.
People aren’t getting the number from the intro, but it reminds them it exists.
It also helps normalize actually think about it or discussing the subject.
Good question, but I expect as far as whether it should be there or not, it doesn’t really matter. There is no harm in it being there, after all. And in the end, if it helps one single person not kill themself, I’d say that’s a win.
There is no harm in it being there, after all.
See, that’s where having the data would be great Because while this is intuitive, it’s not confirmed. I think most shows showing suicide also paint the event in a pretty bad light. What if having the disclaimer there makes someone not want to watch the show, and they continue to glorify suicide, whereas maybe if they watched the show and saw someone in pain after their loved one committed suicide, maybe it’d trigger something in them, to know how much this act would hurt others.
I’m not saying this is the case. I would just like to know the numbers, because unless they show a decrease in suicide attempts since the warning/phone number was introduced, then we’re really just speculating if it’s helping, hurting, or just neutral.
I can say I’ve never glorified suicide. When I’ve been suicidal, suicide is literally the only logical solution my brain can arrive at. It’s completely irrational in hindsight, but it makes so much sense at the time.
I don’t think I have ever not-watched something due to content warnings alone. But it has alerted me that there may be issues, so it doesn’t surprise me when it comes up.
Idk, but I bet they think it’s the least they can try. If it saves just one life, it has been worth.
Yeah it’s like a 0 effort thing to try
Except it’s not zero effort, zero cost.
Pretty much is in reality. But not literally zero, no.
It’s a job creator, so in effect it makes money.
/s
Businesses do not care about people, I can pretty much guarantee those were added in order to waive liability. Example: person commits suicide because they see it in a show, family sues show company because that is linked to the person’s suicide, arguing the show encouraged the person to do it.
Would that hold up in court? I don’t know, probably not, but the company doesn’t want to deal with that. So they add a warning instead so they can just point to that and it gets thrown out immediately.
But do we have evidence they’re effective?
It still takes effort/time/money to do this, and if it has no impact, then that effort/time/money could be used on things that are known to be effective.
I have no idea how much effect they have. It’s possible they have a negative effect.
Op’s question is do we have that information?
How much effort/time/money do you think they put into that white text on black background that’s on screen for like 5 seconds?
It’s negligible, I would be shocked if it wasn’t the same recycled card over and over again that they have some unpaid intern throw in at some point in the final editing stages
It would probably cost more effort/time/money to do a study on its effectiveness than the pre roll does many times over lmao
It’s not about the production cost, its about the opportunity cost.
A quick google search tells me a national ad costs $200k-$1m for a 30s slot. That means 5 seconds of screen time costs $30k-$150k.
I think, at best, it can only help with certain types of potential suicides. Some suicides occur due to apparently hopeless life situations. For instance, I haven’t been able to get a real job in 23 years despite, in that time, finishing a B.A., an M.A., and a Ph.D. Nothing that everybody says to do works for me and I’m frankly tired of hearing it. I’m stuck DoorDashing (Uber was way too abusive) and that I’m stuck doing that is intensely depressing.
Psychology can’t help with this. The only thing that can help is a real job. And that’s what a lot of the babble about suicide prevention seems to miss.
I’m so sorry to hear it.
One of the doormen in my building is kind of in a similar situation. He got his doctorate this year, beautiful flute player. Can’t find a job in his field.
Based on what I’ve heard about the US’s 988, it may rather be negative.
Oh, you’re thinking of killing yourself, let us reinforce that by being absolutely rude, or better yet, time to get taken away by cops into a psych ward.
Let’s see what’s out there with some example (Reddit)
Summary: Person called 988, police showed up 90 minutes later, got taken for mandatory psychological evaluation, forced to stay 2 days in ER, ended up getting billed $6,470.Well that last part is a US specific issue
and people have the right to refuse treatmentYou lose the ability to refuse treatments in any scenario the emergency responders / doctors deem you unfit to make a decision in the best interest of your/someone else health. It’s why “baker acting” in Florida is so controversial. Taking someone against their will and locking them in a facility for a minimum time without any real need of evidence.
Someone calling and telling them you said you were going to kill yourself is often all the evidence they need to start the process, whether you really said that is up to the emergency responders. For my friend that was 9 cop cars in the middle of the night. They dragged him out of bed at 4am because his partner at the time said he hadn’t been responding to her texts and she told them he was depressed so he might kill himself.
Once he got out he told me about it all and I’m fairly certain he won’t ever sleep with his phone on silent/vibrate again. (He broke up with them immediately after, but that has nothing to do with consent)
Wouldn’t that open the door to the bill being declared illegal since you didn’t consent to the services?
It’s been argued for years, The section about involuntary placement was to long to copy and paste here but here is the bill:
The section one would argue unlawful is 1394.467 http://www.leg.state.fl.us/statutes/index.cfm?App_mode=Display_Statute&URL=0300-0399/0394/0394.html
Sidenote: You also have to remember that they have to detain and hold you before diagnosing you, so they may not “force treatment” so much as hold you for 72 hours without any charges against you. Release if no charges, or detain if qualify to be held involuntarily.
not if you live in certain US states and you make a threat that your are going to harm yourself or someone else. depends on the state but they can hold you for a psych eval for a few days, maybe a week
No idea, but I thought this would be a good time to share that teen suicide attempt rates spiked almost 30% in the month following Netflix’s 13 Reasons Why. It’s a pretty bad show, so of course it got 4 seasons.
TBH, I think that’s why shows have this now. Fear of legal liability.
I remember my college had a suicide awareness day where among other things they told people to tell their suicidal friends to call the hotline if they felt suicidal.
Now imagine you are that person and you reach out to a friend for help only to have them tell you to call someone else in a canned speech you were told to tell others.
Two sides to every story. Your friend isn’t your therapist and while instantly reacting with “go call hotline” means you don’t have a friend at all, you cannot expect your friend to be able to bear the weight of your feelings, of your darkest moments with you. Stuff like this ruins people and I know that from experience from both sides. Dealing with suicidal thoughts of other people is extremely stressful and basically a landmine field. You aren’t trained to navigate it properly. You are not objective. And ultimately, other than being a sympathetic ear, you are unable to help them in the way they need help.
Tone matters, like the difference between telling someone they should consider seeing a therapist, and telling someone they need a therapist.
In text it is still hard, but convincing someone to talk to a professional (not saying they are all doctors or something) because you don’t feel equipped to handle the situation on your own shouldn’t be devastating if you go through a small course like that. Never taken one but just off the cuff I’d say offering to call with them and staying for the conversation until you/they agree they feel comfortable carrying on with the help line or what not on their own before walking away would probably be a decent step in the right direction. The line could advise you of the next steps you might not be thinking of in that moment, getting them around other friends/family/bringing them to a medical professional, I’m sure it varies.
All the lukewarm attempts to help, rooted in shallow understanding, reinforced my suicidal ideation. What’s the value of false love from a paid hotline worker one will never speak to again? It’s negative.
Be ready to love the shit out of someone yourself. Share their sorrow. Don’t try to fix it. Just try to understand. It’ll fucking suck. The other person knows it sucks for you. Tell them it sucks and that you’re choosing it.
If you have read the content on https://afsp.org/im-having-thoughts-of-suicide/ I’d be interested to hear your take. After my brother committed suicide I found their content for suicide loss survivors to be very helpful, but as a suicide loss survivor I can’t judge the content they have for folks who are considering suicide.
I’m not the person you replied to but I’ve been passively suicidal for about a decade. I read this article. It seemed a bit prescriptive and patronizing to me. I get the impression that the article is targeted towards people who are acutely suicidal. As someone who’s been chronically suicidal, I’ve noticed that there aren’t many resources that are similar to this for people in my situation. These suicide hotlines seem to be targeted at people who are experiencing acute distress over someone who’s been struggling with mental health for extended periods of time. I’m not going to say these resources are worthless, but they’re worthless to me and I would assume at least a few people who have similar problems. I’ve never felt compelled to reach out or search for resources like this. They’ve always felt insincere, similar to corporate PR speak or celebrity “apologies”. Like these hotlines are there so that people who aren’t suicidal can go “well, we gave them a phone number. We don’t need to feel bad that people are suffering cause we did what we could.” I’m sure these hotlines have helped people and they should stick around. I’m just jaded and cynical.
I asked my wife about suicide hotlines too, she has periods of suicidal ideation and has attempted suicide when she was younger. She said it’s a coin flip for her. They either made her feel more distressed and therefore more suicidal, or they made her slightly less suicidal (enough to not act on it). She said in the moments they helped, they served as a reminder to not provide a permanent solution with a temporary problem. She also hates that phrase but couldn’t find a better way to word it haha.
I’m not sure if what we said will help or hurt in your processing, but those are our honest perspectives
Thank you for that response, I think you did a great job helping me understand you and your wife’s perspective. I had a long period of lowness, and though I was not suicidal, some of the things you described sound close to how I thought and felt.
The part about the suicide hotlines reminded me of is a talk my coworker did on mental health, and she said that if you don’t get along with your therapist within the first two sessions, it’s ok to find another therapist. I imagine that’s what these hotlines are like. When you call in you’re basically grabbing a random person from a crowd, and the chances of that person resonating strongly with your story on the first try is probably low. I could see folks just hanging up if it wasn’t helping, but it seems like they may have better luck if they call back again and talk to somebody different.
At the end of the day though, if somebody has a chronic condition, alleviating it significantly is not an easy task. It seems like these hotlines have to struggle with that tension between wanting to help, but knowing that significant long term improvement isn’t easy to achieve, especially when you’re just talking to the person who is looking for help.
I’m not going to say these resources are worthless, but they’re worthless to me and I would assume at least a few people who have similar problems. I’ve never felt compelled to reach out or search for resources like this. They’ve always felt insincere, similar to corporate PR speak or celebrity “apologies”.
I think this is how my brother mostly felt. One thing that he was into that seemed to help was stoic philosophy. I wasn’t into it when he was alive, but happened to get into it shortly after he died and it immediately resonated with me. I wished we had gotten to talk about it more when he was alive. It certainly helped me deal with the aftermath of losing him.
Thanks again for the response. Good luck finding your peace.
Legend is the first suicide hotline was created after a girl killed herself because she had her first period.
People kill themselves for lots of reasons, but some of those reasons are just ignorance. I feel certain any suicide hotline could have helped her out if she’d called one.
The only things I can quickly find about the first suicide hotline is that it was created because of the high suicide rate in San Francisco.. There might be more to it than that, but it’s what I can find right now.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chad_Varah
Here’s the story from 1953
This makes sense to me. Suicidal ideation has been one of my PMS symptoms since I first started getting my period, and I’m not actually suicidal.
Yuuuup, I ended up getting a tattoo on my wrist that is essentially a personal period joke.
At one stage it was crucial for my survival, it was a kind of grounding token to snap me out of hormonal suicidal insanity when my PMS was at its worst. Something I’d see that would bluntly remind me “it’s not you, it’s your hormones, you don’t actually want this”
When I say the urge came and went zero to sixty back to zero in 30 seconds flat, sometimes that was an understatement. I really struggled because in addition to suicidal ideation during PMS, I had undiagnosed and untreated ADHD, which often gets worse with PMS thanks to the way oestrogen and progesterone play off each other.
Guess who’s got major impulsively issues. Guess what two symptoms really shouldn’t be combined.
I have zero desire to kill myself.
But my hormones seemed desperate to try and make me do it every month, especially as a teen.
It didn’t help that I had endometriosis and at 17 developed a uterine prolapse, on top of a rectal prolapse I’d had since I was 12. I was in agony when I was on my period, so sometimes the desire to make the pain stop overlapped with the suicidal ideation. That sucked. Hard to reason your way out of physical pain.
I’ve had a hysterectomy (from 17-24 my uterus just kept trying to make its own escape anyway despite attempts to sew it in place) and no longer suffer menstrual dysphoria because it turns out that was gender dysphoria not true PMDD. But I still get suicidal ideation as part of PMS, fortunately my ADHD is much better managed so now my tattoo is less a suicide detterant and just a reminder that I still have ovaries (sometimes I genuinely forget, and it takes me a few days to work out why I’m bloated and irritable and why I’m anxious about my sore boobs)
What’s the tattoo? I’m glad you were able to yeet that fucker out of ya 😅
My mum and I had a shared period calendar when I was a young teen and still getting used to tracking my cycle, she hung the calendar and pen in the bathroom to model how I could track my cycle in a diary as I got older.
We invented a key/symbol system so the calendar wasn’t intrusive for my brother and father to see, and one of the symbols we used for the luteal phase was a sort of hourglass ⏳, it was originally my mums poor doodle/sketch of a panty liner to indicate “you might spot a bit this week” but it looked like an hourglass so I joked that symbol meant I’m “just waiting for the storm to arrive”.
It was the perfect symbol for me, because when people ask about the tattoo, and I don’t want to go into the real reason I say “it’s a visual reminder” and if they ask more I can say “it’s an hourglass, because there’s only a little time LEFT, it’s on my left hand - I get my lefts and rights mixed up. Plus it reminds me to put my watch back on after I get dressed, so it helps remind me of a lot of different things”
That’s a nice thing your mom did, and your tattoo is a great reminder that however bad we’re feeling in the moment, that “this too, shall pass.”
I never would have remembered the old number, I believe they changed it to just 988 now. If making it an easy to access more memorable number that we grind into everyone’s brains and saves 1 extra person, it’s worth it. Hopefully it will save many who would have otherwise not been in the mental mindset to look up the help line
There’s evidence that trigger warnings actually worsen anxiety and are counterproductive
The way to treat anxiety is to face the source of anxiety to try and change your relationship and reaction. The best way to do this is via controlled access that exposes one to the trigger gradually in a context that has no risk of harm (eg a media depiction, discussing the concept, building up to discussing the source of trauma that led to the phobic response if applicable)
Trigger warnings enable active avoidance. This sensitizes one to the aversive stimuli and makes the phobic response stronger. As a result when one encounters the stimulus (eg a friend, family, celebrity etc commits suicide, suffers an eating disorder, etc) your resilience to the trigger is now even lower and the response is more likely to be more significant than it was before.
That said education on access to resources like 988 or other warm lines can lower suicide rates, maybe. Research is more mixed here because it’s difficult to prove causation
good points! this is a decent depiction of exposure therapy.
TW have an odd history. they originally were very useful, because one thing you forgot to mention about exposure therapy is all the work that needs to be done leading up to it. you have to have physical grounding skills in place before exposing someone to adverse stimuli.
so imagine you have severe PTSD from SA and a college class is gonna show a film that depicts it in an ugly scene. it could fuck up your whole semester to have traumatic stress symptoms come back unexpectedly. I’m talking panic attacks, flashbacks, mood disruption, difficulty controlling violent impulses, difficulty concentrating, difficulty connecting with others… PTSD can be wild.
so the prof might give a TW on the syllabus, so people just dont come in that day if they don’t wanna see it.
nowdays TW is just “here’s a thing you dont like!” not “here’s something that could potentially ruin your life again”
I don’t think it’s about making a positive difference, it’s about liability.
I don’t doubt that someone might be thinking that, but I do doubt that any lawyer thinks it’s necessary. As far as I know nobody has ever brought suit against a TV show for a suicide case.
But I’m not an attorney.
I’m pretty sure that 13 Reasons Why show had a whole thing involving just this
Lawsuits of “my child died because they copied your TV show” have been going on for decades.
Definitely better than the YouTube approach and just make people call it suiclide, so no one really knows that they can kill themselves
Agreed.
