Suicide jumper dies shortly after falling from Parking Structure 4
A woman threatened suicide at Parking Structure #4 in Santa Monica on Dec 6. Five fire trucks and a circus of squad cars and lordy knows how many mental health professionals… they talked her down.
Two weeks later she was right back in the same spot. Evidently none of the “help” helped. More fire trucks, more squad cars, send in the clowns again. They talked her down.
Another 2 weeks later, she’s back again and this time she did it fast before the circus arrived.
Don’t tell me the signs weren’t there, that nobody knew, or that she didn’t get help. I suspect the clockwork 2 weeks between each attempt was standard 3 day evaluation + 10 day hospitalization. I suspect that they locked her up, poked her with pins and needles and therapy, then when time was up they released her right back to the mouth of suicide. Don’t tell me suicide is preventable. It’s preventable for 2 weeks, eh. Don’t tell me there’s any hope for the hopeless.
11 comments
This saddens me. Poor woman.
How are you feeling about it all? I can see your frustration at the system, are you doing alright otherwise?
You sense correctly, I went through the machine just like she did which is why her case feels so real. The crisis response circus, the lockup, the involuntary hospitalization, and then spit back into the same shitty life none the worse for wear and a couple thousand dollars deeper in debt because, yes, they charge you for all of it.
It makes me feel so much worse, more hopeless. A journalist once wrote a great piece about the failure of this system, likening it to a concrete building where people are sent but there’s nothing inside. Ultimately nothing can be done.
Yeah I’m not doing well at all. Thanks for asking though, I really appreciate how much you care about others.
You cannot stop a determined suicidal person, period, end of story. My last year at university I went to a suicidality two day seminar hosted by a Phd Psychologist who had worked as administrator for a major pychiatric hospital, he’d seen a fair bit of suicide after discharge and he’s the one who told me this bit about that you can’t stop a determined suicidal person.
He talked about how he’d put this special shirt, not a straight jacket, more of a rubber shirt on suicidal patients. A lot of people want to be talked out of it. They want better drugs, or better support system, and that was our job to try and help those people. We were supposed to try and figure out how to get them help.
There’s this thing called Psy ache, literal mental pain and it is as real as pain from a broken bone and often worse. We’re supposed to find a way to stop it because if you can often people stop being suicidal. However when it gets to a certain point, you will end it, some people will start hurting everyone in the area just because they lose all control.
So if they just end themselves… that’s probably according to plan. It does have a ripple effect, and makes it harder on the rest of us, but I doubt they had as much choice as we think they did. The most choice they had was in method.
I think you’re right that there are different levels of suicide, and many people just need to be talked out of a crisis. I think especially in the case of young people who haven’t yet figured out their own coping methods, they can use a reminder that they’re not alone.
And then there are the hopeless cases who are beyond help. But are they? Or is it just that the system is going about it wrong? I can tell you exactly what would help me, not a 2 week holding period after which I’m promptly forgotten, but something like a case worker who would dig deep into the problems I’m facing (not mental health but real world things like debt, unemployment, failing health, etc), but that’s far beyond the scope of any social service. Ironically it would cost them less than fire trucks and cars and ambulances and doctors.
I also know what you mean about psy ache. When it hits it’s like suffocation, and no amount of therapy can make a suffocating person feel better. I’ve also seen it in others and I have my scientific theories on what can cut through. Researchers need to focus on the amygdala as a channel to break people out of it. But that’s just a theory of mine that’ll die with me.
Ultimately yeah, a person who’s hell bent on suicide will do it unless a better option is presented. But no one’s interested in presenting better options; they’re just trying to cut off the route to suicide. That’s like trying to dam a river without giving it any other outlets, that dam will bust eventually.
The system just fails people, no doubt. It can’t give them what they need, doesn’t even try in many cases. I’ve told my therapist before they can’t solve my problems. They can’t get me out of Oklahoma, get me the price I need for my house, get me into the program I need to get into, get me the job I need out of state.
They can’t even do what I need in state, get me a job right here, get my damn floors fixed, get my roof fixed, get the squirrels out of my attic and the rats out of the walls. Get the body work done on my car and truck and fix my truck’s fuel pump. I tell ya, these things would make me less depressed.
They keep asking how they can help, and I can tell them specifically is the hilarious thing. I’m certain it’s the same for a lot of depressed people, living with problems they just need some financial help to fix, but jobs don’t pay enough anymore. If you can get a job.
You nailed it. The cure is to treat the 1000 cuts, one at a time if necessary, but anything short of that will fail because the patient is still bleeding. But like you said, what can a therapist do to fix your roof & floors, fix your car and help you get a stable job?
To quote Macbeth’s doctor: “therein the patient must minister himself”
translation (to quote the priest in Blazing Saddles) “Son….. your on your own!”
I guess I see the function of therapists and mental health professionals. It’s to prop us up so we can fix our own fucked up lives, pump us with antidepressants & coping tricks so that we can fix our roofs, floors, cars and employment situations. But when we’re completely overloaded to the verge of suicide, there’s no amount of propping up that will get the job done.
I’ve made the analogy to my family about a person trying to push a car a mile to the gas station. I’m pushing, pushing, pushing, exhausted, collapsing, and I need help. They come along, but instead of pushing the car, they push me. It’s like they prop me up against the fender and push me, saying go go go. Meanwhile I’m like “push. the. car. for. fucksakes”
and in retrospect I guess this is the exact apathy we were talking about elsewhere. I go to a clinic where there’s this huge “Zero Suicide” mural painted on the wall, and they do make a huge deal about trying to prevent suicide.
but it’s like murder, suicide is an introverted murder, and all you have to do is be quicker than the people who are supposed to stop you.
Personally, I have something put into my head that when suicidal thought starts coming up, serious thought, I call hotline… that safety hatch is so strong, and I’ve pushed past it a little but never enough to be close to unsafe. Cognitive Behavioral Therapy works, is what I’ve learned. That little redirect is really powerful.
If I got towards really determined I would be inpatient again before I got close to an attempt. Inpatient is supposed to put a stop to that, put you on some serious sedatives to the point you can’t get ambitious enough to do such a thing. As much as I hate it, I’d hate being in a real hospital more.
I don’t have the confidence to believe in my success, and the knock on effects will always bother me too much. I mean, if I had psy ache that bad….. I’d have a psychotic break and there’s no telling what I’d do. Truth be told, I’m too weak to let myself get that low, I’d crack and smoke some THC before then, shoot my job prospects in the foot. Or worse, get some heroin… never have, but it’s a threat I keep making, there’s a level of psy ache where I do it.
Do you ever get worried that your ebbing determination will result in a living dead zombie who has neither the ambition to end it nor to better your life? Because that seems to be the logical end, if the treatment is to numb the patient into compliance with life.
Not through sedatives but just through repeated failure and learned helplessness, I suppose most people learn to settle into an acceptable level of pain. They schlep through a lousy job for 35 years with the goal being to retire from said job, mainly because they lack the energy to find a better one. It seems to me that this same helpless acceptance is how the mental health profession treats the suicidal impulse. Like you said they “put you on some serious sedatives to the point you can’t get ambitious enough to do such a thing”
But they’re also killing whatever strength we may have to solve our problems. I think ambition is all we have left at the point of desperation. Ambition by another name is “hope”. Kill that and we’re just lumps of meat.
Sad story but every suicide is a giant message to our govt’s that we need to offer a safe, fast, painless way for people to end their lives and to die in peace and dignity than to risk such crazy ways to go. Its a huge drain on our social services too.
The firemen could’ve focused on burning buildings than to stop a jumper. The mental health professionals could focus on people that may want to live but need treatment for suicidal ideation.
Not to mention it should be a msg to those nations that already have euthanasia/assisted-suicide, like Canada to allow it with no-conditions to anyone that requests it, esp. people suffering from mental illness.
You can see someone is terminally ill with blood tests and so on…there are no such tests for mental illness, which is why people don’t take it seriously. But mental health is just as serious and important as physical. Govt’s needs to stop dragging their azz and legalize Maid for all reasons that people request.
They stop 99% of people from getting Maid because 1% ‘might’ change their mind, this is evil and crazy. What an ugly time we live in where grown adults are so stupid and backwards…not to mention most of it is due to the influence of religious lunacy.
I agree the US needs to pull its ass out of the medieval ages, stop demonizing all suicides, and provide a dignified and painless exit where people can spend their last moments at peace, surrounded by loved ones and medically tended in the event of mishap. Instead what do we get? Parking decks, guns and ropes from the hardware store. Hardly dignified, peaceful or safe. And the mess…
Right here on this site are documented cases of people determined to end it but trapped without legal means. The highest profile case, Matthew Warren, son of megachurch leader Rick Warren, accounted his ordeal with shady internet dealings, losing thousands in scams over euth drugs, the humiliation and insult to injury. He didn’t want to go by a messy means like jumping or gun because he didn’t want to further traumatize his mother with a mangled body. After all the failed attempts to get the right drug, he resorted to buying a gun and leaving that mess he so wanted to avoid.
I’m sure the jumper in the story went through the same ordeal, it’s so common amongst those who are determined to end our lives. Violent means are only a last desperate resort, and for this woman to be there 3 times is proof that something’s really fucked up here, and it’s not her.
Spot on…indeed ending one’s life is the biggest and hardest decision anyone can make. The problem is that those people who have the power to fully legalize euthanasia are bureaucrats, and they couldn’t give a rat’s ass about this problem.
They’re too focused on their career, social life and their personal issues than to spare a thought to those in dire situations. Many of them come from a religious background and their thinking is shaped by the bad, evil, stupid, outdated ideas that come from the Bronze Age.
Their mantra is ‘life is precious.’ Ok fine it can be…but what about when it’s not? But that’s where their thought process ends because life is a gift from a magic invisible ghost and we can’t destroy it.
That’s when semi-rational people go off the deep end. And they use these idiotic reasons to deny services like euthanasia (and abortion) that people desperately need.
Thankfully Christianity is rapidly dying off due to low birth rates and no doubt the internet and other reasons…so in time secularists will be in charge…but we still have to work to get these rights in place and codified into law.
People in the euthanasia mvmt have been working for many decades, literally suffering and dying to get people to see there is an urgent need for this option.
We need to find a way to use our Constitution and other Declarations of Human/Rights freedoms to prevent religious lunatics from being allowed at the adult table. They’ve been fighting tooth and nail against women’s, gay rights and the right to die as well.
The religious are nothing but a monkey on all our backs…and if Christianity wasn’t bad enough, now in western nations like Canada, Europe, UK, (somewhat in the US) Islam is rising and they’re basically Christians on acid with guns. They’re more extreme and dangerous and will drag us back to the 7th century if nothing is done to stop them.
Sorry I’m getting a bit carried away here-I despise religion as you can tell…either way, we sane, normal people must find a way to unite and push to have these needed services to be hammered into law so no Conservative gov’t can come in and undo all our hard work and set us back centuries again.
Last point-we have Maid in Canada and they were supposed to make it available for the mentally ill but they keep kicking the can down the road for more evaluation. Independent studies were done and it was found that there was absolutely no reason to delay extending it to the mentally ill. Once again it was the same anti-euthansia groups trying to prevent access from becoming broader.
These are the same sorts of games they play when it comes to abortion. Delays, tests, excuses, anything to prevent women getting access to abortion where it’s legal.
There should be lawsuits and severe penalties for anyone involved in intentionally delaying access to abortion/euthanasia. I think in time we’ll get there-just like we did with science/medicine, but we’re going to be forced to fight against these imbeciles all the way, until they’re no longer an impediment.