With the stress of the pandemic and oppressive changes in the healthcare industry in recent decades, mental health issues are at an all-time high for doctors, nurses, and others. Health professionals are at high risk of suicide. Why would someone jump from a building, take a bottle full of pills or put a gun to their head? ![]() Suicide is all too common and the suicide rate has been increasing dramatically in recent years, especially among doctors who see no other way out. Imagine being in a situation that seems impossible, where death is the only way out. I’ve spoken with thousands of doctors and medical students who are struggling with thoughts of self-harm. Pamela Wible and I run a suicide helpline for doctors. One step towards preventing suicides is to use less offensive and stigmatizing language when discussing the topic. You just kind of let go of all that a little bit and be a bit gentler with your belief system and be a little bit gentler with your thoughts.What is the least painful way to die? Why do people commit suicide painfully? Why do doctors commit suicide in such painful and scary ways?įirst, we should agree that it’s better to say that a person has died of suicide than to say that they have committed suicide. And so hope, hopelessness, these ways of thinking aren't really helpful to you. Once you start accepting a little bit more than you might realize, the future is not really in my control at all and the past is already behind me. You have to start thinking in a less aggressive way. You're sort of thinking like right and wrong, black and white, disaster or complete relief from disaster, fight or flight. I think it's so important that we stop thinking in kind of a bivalent way, especially if you're the sort of person who suffers from suicidal ideation. On the Tibetan prayer "May we be happy without hope" ![]() When you say, you know what? Even with all the suffering, I'm going to stick around. And that's the opportunity for beginning to make sense of life and to turn life into something that you're grateful for. And he thought that in standing up to life, as he put it, as with Sisyphus rolling that rock back up the hill, that's where you find your meaning. I'm not going to let you do what I know you're trying to make me do, which is to end my life, I'm going to stand up to you. ![]() And so you should say, you know what, life? I'm tougher than you are. And I think part of the story of how I am slowly trying to liberate myself from suicidal thinking is recognizing that those two ways of thinking were both mistaken and were kind of two sides of the same coin – that I needed to learn to accept my suicidal thinking, recognize that it was there, and not to add a moral label to it, not to be ashamed of it or afraid of it.Ĭlancy Martin says, "I needed to learn to accept my suicidal thinking, recognize that it was there, and not to add a moral label to it, not to be ashamed of it or afraid of it."Ĭamus thought that you should not kill yourself out of stubbornness, that life is suffering and it is ultimately meaningless. And so these beliefs were constantly at war with each other. The desire to kill myself was extremely potent and also the feeling that this was absolutely the wrong thing to do in a moral way was also very potent. I think I always had this very conflicted view of suicide. On how he is liberating himself from suicidal thinking That's just the number one piece of advice I can give people. If you are a person who has ever felt the least bit suicidal – or if you are a person who has someone in their life who sometimes you think might suffer depression or might go through a suicidal period – I urge you, I cannot urge you more strongly, get rid of that gun. On his top piece of advice: Get rid of the gun It's not something I have to act on and I don't have to feel bad about it.' Suddenly it's like, 'Oh, that's just something I'm thinking. And when we remove the stigma, when you're in a room full of people and you realize, oh my gosh, all my friends, all these people around me, they also have thought about taking their own lives. When you stigmatize something, you give it a kind of allure. ![]() You can also lift some of the appeal of the thought. It's not something I have to act on and I don't have to feel bad about it. Suddenly it's like, Oh, that's just something I'm thinking.
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