Essentially what I want to say is as follows, and it is not based on direct experience. It comes from what I have observed about how mental health support works in this country, plus the role of the police in dealing with the collapse of support structures.
It seems to me that, if you present with what I believe is termed 'suicidal ideation' then you run the risk of having your problems ignored in favour of preventing harm - ostensibly to yourself. Conventional wisdom posits this is a favourable outcome - generally speaking we don't want people doing themselves in. But in the context of an authoritarian society that thinks it knows what's best for people while simultaneously offering no real solutions what does this mean?
I think it means people are afraid that, if they so present, they will be betrayed. Instead of really listening to a potential cry for help, they assume that sectioning them, sending the police around (potentially jailing them in unfit facilities for an undisclosed period of time), or otherwise taking control of their lives - perhaps even forcibly medicating them, is the right thing to do.
I cannot say whether it is or it isn't in any given case. But my fear is that in scaring people off you are forcing people to downplay their symptoms. This is because, IMHO, our system is locked in a state of triage. Due to budget cuts it's in crisis mode; this means if you present feeling 'down' you will be asked about suicidal intention and one of two things happens:
Either you say yes (assuming this is the case of course) and hope the healthcare professional you are seeing chooses to deal with this appropriately (and that is entirely subjective).
Or you say no, in which case a state of mind that might be very serious indeed is dismissed. They don't have the resources, so you'll be sent away with very little to help you. This just feeds the problem of isolation and abandonment and depression etc even more.
If it takes the threat of suicide to get help, something is very wrong.
The point I am making, and likely very clumsily (precisely because we have to dance around this issue), is about trust.
If someone is suicidal it's not hard to see why (in the main): look at the material conditions in our society. People like this aren't even guaranteed an income, yet denied any access to positive opportunities without one. But unfortunately medical orthodoxy seems to assert that 'being a risk to oneself or others' overrides the need to change our approach.
And of course those are important considerations, but I cannot tell you how many times I've spoken to healthcare professionals who read that boilerplate script out before even addressing the reality of the situation. That tells me that, while they care, they do so in a perfunctory impersonal way. That is not what people need.
If people can't trust their support professionals, how can they ever get help? What we need is a society that cares; compassion must be the bedrock to any healing approach. If people feel they cannot be honest it cannot be right that they don't get the support they need just because, by not being suicidal, they are not serious.
I hope this makes sense. Once again: it is of course important to take safety of self/patient and others seriously. But something seems wrong in our approach to me; the aforementioned binary seems inevitably to set patient against support in a way that cannot be positive. Consequently suicide - specifically feelings of suicide - are not properly discussed and people are not helped.
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