Every show with a suicide now has a disclaimer with a suicide hotline at the beginning. Is there any evidence that these warnings make a positive difference?
Warnings are great, sometimes I’m not in the right head space to watch those kind of scenes. I usually just don’t watch the episode until I feel it won’t affect me. This is also why doesthedogdie is a very useful resource for me
No, but like airport security, the point is to look like it’s effective.
I wish I could opt out of those messages. On streaming platforms that should be doable! (I really hate spoilers.)
Suicides can be really easy to prevent.
Like, the hotline itself is incredibly effective, and reminding people it exists would naturally help.
People aren’t getting the number from the intro, but it reminds them it exists.
Even though crisis hotlines are common, they have not been well studied for efficacy.
Somewhat related, but I think suicide hotlines can be a big problem if they are understaffed. I feel like in my country they are just there to check a box. I’ve had two suicidal crises, both times I called the hotline, waited 20+ minutes and gave up. It made me feel even worse and more lost.
:( I’ve been in a similar situation, but I’ve never called; I have friends that I can talk to openly about this stuff, and not freak them out or have them be judgemental. I don’t know you, but I hope you are doing better, and can persevere. Life can be awful, brutal. Being alone in a time of need is… I can’t even think of a word with enough emphasis.
If you want, you can send me a message. Might not be helpful, but maybe it will. Just say hi, if you want. You aren’t alone. :)
That really sucks. I hope you’re doing better now.
It also helps normalize actually think about it or discussing the subject.
It’s really about not being sued by someone’s family for claiming that they got the idea from the show.
Oh please, there are hundreds if not thousands of stories about suicide out there and they don’t have warnings
Stop being so overly cynic, trust me, it’s not as edgy as you think it is
It’s notable that you needlessly made this personal…almost as if you existed at trump levels of projection.
Having more experience than you in a topic does not mean projection
You know nothing about me yet chose to make it personal twice. This is too strange.
Nothing here is about you bud… Self centered much?
I’ll just stop feeding the attention hungry hippo
Sorry but you don’t get to walk in, behave badly, and blame the other person. That’s just toxic. Have a block.
Oh no! Anyways…
I predicted in about 10 years disclaimers at the beginning will include, ‘This show depicts murder. Neither the show’s creators producers or actors condone the taking of another human life.’
They need “This show depicts stupidity” but they will never have it.
No. It it makes normies feel good for trying
When I was suicidal the thing that helped me most was lostallhope dot com.
"55% success chance, 15 minutes and 80-something agony for something as drastic as slicing one’s neck? Fucking hell there’s no getting away from it is there. " - I thought.
Think it got taken down a long time ago, last I checked it didn’t load anyway, prolly cuz of the shady shit happening on SS
These helplines ain’t shit, I’m not even suicidal and it makes me want to an hero seeing that patronising cringe shit. There better be some solid proof it works on the masses, I can’t imagine how much actual mental health service funding in the UK could’ve been done from the budget of all that social advertising.
I would never call one.
Hopefully it’s because you’d never need one
Same, I dont get them
Look at all these people downvoting you for living your life.
And I have called one. Nothing wrong with needing help
Did they alert authorities? Hope you’re doing better.
I’ve lost too many people in my life to suicide, and it’s a really hard topic for me to watch on screen.
So even though I’ve got no use for a hotline, just knowing that the show will center suicide as a theme is important to me being able to decide if/when to watch it.
I can’t imagine they’d be helpful to me, if anything it makes me feel lesser or condescended to. It’s not the right way to talk about suicide with people who are suicidal.
Suicide comes in many different flavors. The most common in my limited experience is desperation. If you are so utterly desperate for literally anyone to listen to you, I don’t see how it would hurt. Especially since there’s such a positive stigma surrounding the hotline. I personally know a couple of people that the hotline helped.
I like the hotline
Idk, but I bet they think it’s the least they can try. If it saves just one life, it has been worth.
Businesses do not care about people, I can pretty much guarantee those were added in order to waive liability. Example: person commits suicide because they see it in a show, family sues show company because that is linked to the person’s suicide, arguing the show encouraged the person to do it.
Would that hold up in court? I don’t know, probably not, but the company doesn’t want to deal with that. So they add a warning instead so they can just point to that and it gets thrown out immediately.
Yeah it’s like a 0 effort thing to try
Except it’s not zero effort, zero cost.
Pretty much is in reality. But not literally zero, no.
It’s a job creator, so in effect it makes money.
/s
That’s not it. It’s simply that if someone comes suicide after watching, no one can point the finger at the producers.
But do we have evidence they’re effective?
It still takes effort/time/money to do this, and if it has no impact, then that effort/time/money could be used on things that are known to be effective.
I have no idea how much effect they have. It’s possible they have a negative effect.
Op’s question is do we have that information?
How much effort/time/money do you think they put into that white text on black background that’s on screen for like 5 seconds?
It’s negligible, I would be shocked if it wasn’t the same recycled card over and over again that they have some unpaid intern throw in at some point in the final editing stages
It would probably cost more effort/time/money to do a study on its effectiveness than the pre roll does many times over lmao
It’s not about the production cost, its about the opportunity cost.
A quick google search tells me a national ad costs $200k-$1m for a 30s slot. That means 5 seconds of screen time costs $30k-$150k.
Legend is the first suicide hotline was created after a girl killed herself because she had her first period.
People kill themselves for lots of reasons, but some of those reasons are just ignorance. I feel certain any suicide hotline could have helped her out if she’d called one.
The only things I can quickly find about the first suicide hotline is that it was created because of the high suicide rate in San Francisco.. There might be more to it than that, but it’s what I can find right now.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chad_Varah
Here’s the story from 1953
This makes sense to me. Suicidal ideation has been one of my PMS symptoms since I first started getting my period, and I’m not actually suicidal.
Yuuuup, I ended up getting a tattoo on my wrist that is essentially a personal period joke.
At one stage it was crucial for my survival, it was a kind of grounding token to snap me out of hormonal suicidal insanity when my PMS was at its worst. Something I’d see that would bluntly remind me “it’s not you, it’s your hormones, you don’t actually want this”
When I say the urge came and went zero to sixty back to zero in 30 seconds flat, sometimes that was an understatement. I really struggled because in addition to suicidal ideation during PMS, I had undiagnosed and untreated ADHD, which often gets worse with PMS thanks to the way oestrogen and progesterone play off each other.
Guess who’s got major impulsively issues. Guess what two symptoms really shouldn’t be combined.
I have zero desire to kill myself.
But my hormones seemed desperate to try and make me do it every month, especially as a teen.
It didn’t help that I had endometriosis and at 17 developed a uterine prolapse, on top of a rectal prolapse I’d had since I was 12. I was in agony when I was on my period, so sometimes the desire to make the pain stop overlapped with the suicidal ideation. That sucked. Hard to reason your way out of physical pain.
I’ve had a hysterectomy (from 17-24 my uterus just kept trying to make its own escape anyway despite attempts to sew it in place) and no longer suffer menstrual dysphoria because it turns out that was gender dysphoria not true PMDD. But I still get suicidal ideation as part of PMS, fortunately my ADHD is much better managed so now my tattoo is less a suicide detterant and just a reminder that I still have ovaries (sometimes I genuinely forget, and it takes me a few days to work out why I’m bloated and irritable and why I’m anxious about my sore boobs)
What’s the tattoo? I’m glad you were able to yeet that fucker out of ya 😅
My mum and I had a shared period calendar when I was a young teen and still getting used to tracking my cycle, she hung the calendar and pen in the bathroom to model how I could track my cycle in a diary as I got older.
We invented a key/symbol system so the calendar wasn’t intrusive for my brother and father to see, and one of the symbols we used for the luteal phase was a sort of hourglass ⏳, it was originally my mums poor doodle/sketch of a panty liner to indicate “you might spot a bit this week” but it looked like an hourglass so I joked that symbol meant I’m “just waiting for the storm to arrive”.
It was the perfect symbol for me, because when people ask about the tattoo, and I don’t want to go into the real reason I say “it’s a visual reminder” and if they ask more I can say “it’s an hourglass, because there’s only a little time LEFT, it’s on my left hand - I get my lefts and rights mixed up. Plus it reminds me to put my watch back on after I get dressed, so it helps remind me of a lot of different things”
That’s a nice thing your mom did, and your tattoo is a great reminder that however bad we’re feeling in the moment, that “this too, shall pass.”
I never would have remembered the old number, I believe they changed it to just 988 now. If making it an easy to access more memorable number that we grind into everyone’s brains and saves 1 extra person, it’s worth it. Hopefully it will save many who would have otherwise not been in the mental mindset to look up the help line
I don’t think it’s about making a positive difference, it’s about liability.
I don’t doubt that someone might be thinking that, but I do doubt that any lawyer thinks it’s necessary. As far as I know nobody has ever brought suit against a TV show for a suicide case.
But I’m not an attorney.
Lawsuits of “my child died because they copied your TV show” have been going on for decades.
I’m pretty sure that 13 Reasons Why show had a whole thing involving just this
I remember my college had a suicide awareness day where among other things they told people to tell their suicidal friends to call the hotline if they felt suicidal.
Now imagine you are that person and you reach out to a friend for help only to have them tell you to call someone else in a canned speech you were told to tell others.
Tone matters, like the difference between telling someone they should consider seeing a therapist, and telling someone they need a therapist.
In text it is still hard, but convincing someone to talk to a professional (not saying they are all doctors or something) because you don’t feel equipped to handle the situation on your own shouldn’t be devastating if you go through a small course like that. Never taken one but just off the cuff I’d say offering to call with them and staying for the conversation until you/they agree they feel comfortable carrying on with the help line or what not on their own before walking away would probably be a decent step in the right direction. The line could advise you of the next steps you might not be thinking of in that moment, getting them around other friends/family/bringing them to a medical professional, I’m sure it varies.
Two sides to every story. Your friend isn’t your therapist and while instantly reacting with “go call hotline” means you don’t have a friend at all, you cannot expect your friend to be able to bear the weight of your feelings, of your darkest moments with you. Stuff like this ruins people and I know that from experience from both sides. Dealing with suicidal thoughts of other people is extremely stressful and basically a landmine field. You aren’t trained to navigate it properly. You are not objective. And ultimately, other than being a sympathetic ear, you are unable to help them in the way they need help.
Feeling suicidal usually isn’t something that talking to a friend can resolve.
Getting a suicidal person to access the right kind of help is the right move.
That doesn’t mean you refuse to talk to a suicidal person, it means that part of supporting them as a friend is helping them get help.
Also as someone who spent a lot of time when I was younger as an untrained suicide counselor, it’s rough on you. Suicidal people should reach out to friends, but understand that if your friends aren’t able to help or keep boundaries there it’s not you, it’s not you being a burden, they may love you very much, but they need to engage in self preservation and the experts have better coping mechanisms, are in therapy, and have professional distance. Being an untrained suicide counselor was both a form of self harm and working through my trauma. I did real good for others and I don’t really regret it, but if you’re feeling the urge to do it, either get trained or get therapy, ideally both. I did later get trained in a form of counseling relevant to my traumas and I’m still comfortable doing that, but suicide counseling is rough at the best of times like being an emotional emt. And like emts they want to get to you in time to help, so if you need them use them, but the untrained are more like first aid, they can keep you around until an emt can get you to a doctor.
Serious question: How do you tell someone suicidal that opens up to you, that you can’t handle the topic without making them feel worse?
“I care deeply for you and that’s why I’ll acknowledge I can’t give the help you need. You need an expert not just a friend, and I can’t hurt myself helping you”
