A Message to Someone With Suicidal Thoughts

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 uh I met at the University of Alberta when I was on a boat 18 and uh he was quite the bizarre person he vanished one day about 20 years later he got on a bus in Winnipeg and to go visit his family and never showed up and they never found a trace of them 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 uh he was a funny guy this thoughtberger was his name he used to give us multiple choice tests did a course on creativity and now and then he'd throw in a multiple choice test question then all four answers would be the same which I thought was I guess that was creative 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 uh what did he say about suicide you can always do it tomorrow yeah well you know that's 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 um is it not possible just 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 it's final Act then 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 um 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 there's a pistol down there and it's in the top right hand corner of the 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 and put the Barrel in my mouth and and uh 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 pro 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 or inflammatory condition or you know you're ill in some way that hasn't been diagnosed or 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 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 brains 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've 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 uh 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

Channel: Jordan B Peterson Clips

Views: 183,732

Keywords: psychology, philosophy, Jordan B. Peterson, Jordan Peterson, JB Peterson, jordanbpeterson, jordanpeterson, personality, understandmyself, selfauthoring, neuropsychology, jordan peterson clips, jp peterson clips, jp clips, jordan peterson podcast clips, jordan peterson live, jordan peterson livestream, jordan peterson shorts, jordan peterson tiktoks, jordan peterson motivational clips

Id: QoZTww2xnbM

Length: 6min 55sec (415 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 06 2023