(Untitled)

[wherearethebees]

You and your partner are kind of insular, as a couple, but your partner comes from a larger social circle that he or she used to be closer to before you started shacking up. Your partner confesses to you that he or she is suicidal.

Do you tell other people?

Please explain your answers.

Comments

[nextdrinksonme]

No, because there's a difference between actively and passively suicidal. If he just feels like he wants to die, I talk to him and encourage him to get help. It's only if he has a figurative gun to his head do I call anyone. And then it's the crisis line. It's not any of his friends' business. If he wanted them to know, he would have told them himself.

[hashishinahooka]

I agree about actively/passively suicidal, which is why I would never know how to respond to someone saying they were. I am passively suicidal, and I have only confided that to my best friend because he is too. I wouldn't tell anyone else for fear they would overreact.

[wherearethebees]

I am having such a hard time with this line of thinking. I spent the last week in and out of mental hospitals because my college boyfriend (who is now like a brother to me) tried to commit suicide. And he'd been suicidal for months, and his fucking idiot childish girlfriend didn't think to tell ANYONE.

I understand wanting to respect privacy. And I'm really trying to see things from her side to understand how this happened, even though I think she is the most poisonous and clueless person I've ever met. But not telling the closest remaining people in someone's life (whether friends or family) is fuckin' mindboggling to me.

[nextdrinksonme]

What would telling people would have done? In many states you can't commit someone unless they are actively suicidal (saying "I'm going to kill myself" or doing something to act on those feelings). Saying "I feel suicidal" is not enough

[wherearethebees]

I imagine I'm too involved in the particulars of this situation so it's hard to talk in the broad scale, because in this situation his girlfriend did NOT have the right resources, did NOT make choices that would facilitate him maintaining at least baseline functionality, did NOT do the right thing in a pretty staggering number of instances that we all (the friends that she has forced him away from, the family that can't stand her) feel actively contributed to his decline.

But generally, I guess my thinking is this: it's really possible to think you're doing the right thing and make absolutely terrible, wrong decisions anyway. And I accept that about myself and about other people. So to me, if my partner tells me what amounts to "I'm a threat to myself," then I would at least get another voice involved just in case perhaps I don't have the right information or resources. At minimum, this person would check ME. Depending on my partner's relationship to his parents or other friends, I would allude to the circumstances. Singularly trying