30 years ago anyone who was depressed and suicidal, anyone who mentioned that they were suicidal would have immediately been admitted to a “Place of Safety”/Hospital environment. Suicide was once recognised as a life-threatening emergency.
Thousands of people die needlessly in Australia because “Suicidal people are being cared for in the Community”. We have taken the approach for
the past few years of just talking and nothing has improved infact suicide numbers are increasing.
Caring for in the community simply means that everyone is put at risk. Mental Health disasters happen many times a day in Australia and the World. A good example is the murder/suicide recently in an affluent area of Brisbane, QLD.
In more than 80% of completed suicides and other mental health disasters someone close to the patient and or the patient themselves have tried, in good faith, to get help from professionals but been turned away.
Threats of suicide and self-harm including actual self-harm should be treated as if they were actual attempted suicides. In simple terms people are either suicidal or not suicidal. Personal judgments’ about highly moderately, vaguely, possibly suicidal, should not be used/they are dangerously misleading.
If an individual or his family says they are suicidal he/she is treated as suicidal.
No one grandiose professional can make an arbitrary decision that a patient who was seriously suicidal one day is no longer suicidal the next.
Fanita Clark
