PSA

I was doing some reading the other day and I came across a long-form article on one man's experience with treatment-resistant depression and suicidal ideation. And it started like so many other articles that deal with suicide do: with a statement urging people who may be considering suicide not to act on their feelings, but to contact organizations that would help. Something like this:

Dial 911 in an emergency. Or call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-TALK (8255), 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, or use the Lifeline Chat at the Lifeline website. The Lifeline is free, confidential, and available to everyone.

In all honesty, these messages barely register with me anymore. They're like the side-effects part of pharmaceutical advertising; if I haven't checked out by the time I get to that point, I'm certainly no longer paying attention once it starts. I think the only reason why I noticed anything this time out was that it opened the article, rather than being tacked on to the end. Still, I think I would have simply blown it off were it not for the fact that I'd been reading other articles that dealt with potentially self-harmful behavior, and there had been no such message.

So why aren't articles about, say, excessive drinking or violent crime prefaced with the same sorts of public service announcements? If it's understood that it's possible to connect to a person who may be considering killing themselves (or their families/acquaintances) via a message like this, why not other people who may be considering behavior that society would like to prevent? It's not like such messaging doesn't exist. Anti-drug messages are scattered around the landscape like so many fallen leaves in the Autumn. But particular messages about how to receive help with a drug or alcohol problem aren't a ubiquitous feature of articles about people attempting to deal with such problems. Likewise, articles about people seeking to avoid, or end, entanglement in criminal activities don't always come with pointers to resources that may help.

Which lead me to wonder: Are the anti-suicide messages at the beginning or end of articles about depression for a depressed depressed person who may be reading, or for the rest of us? The downside of being unable to understand what happens in other people's minds is that it leaves us without a solid way of judging the effectiveness of such messaging on what I would think is the intended audience. Sure one can ask people who present (or are in) treatment or the like if they've seen such messages and what part they've played in those people's thinking, but for people who've killed themselves, there is no such avenue for understanding. From my limited understanding of depression, it seems that such messaging is unlikely to make a difference. Not to be snide, but were it that easy, there wouldn't be as large of a problem. Part of it, I think, is a general difficulty in relating to people suffering from mental illness, mainly because they don't always see themselves as ill. Plenty of people, however, speak to those suffering from mental illness as if they were instead suffering from a physical malady, and one they should wish to  be rid of. I've been guilty of the same. An uncle succumbed to Schizophrenia and it was intensely difficult for me to speak to him appropriately. Of course, my simply telling him that he wasn't the Messiah wasn't going to suddenly cure him and restore him to the person I remembered. But to listen to me, one would have concluded that I sincerely believed that I might somehow convince him.

Part of me suspects that such messages are legally mandated, but my Google-fu was not up to the task of tracking down any such regulation. And besides, it's not like this would be the only journalistic convention that had attained broad adoption across the industry.

Me being me, I suspect that a lot of what's happening is that I'm simply overthinking things. For all that there may be a general understanding that hopelessness and despair are overly common in American society, reactions to them are often based on a combination of the perceived outcomes and the level of sympathy towards the sufferer (two factors that may themselves be intertwined). While there are religious strictures in some faiths that hold that despair is a sin, and suicide along with it, for many people, a loss of hope leading to self-harm is basically a tragedy, and the story ends there. Despair that leads to injury to others, or to the risk thereof, tends to be brushed aside, in favor of explanations that cast the actor as morally culpable. So a young person who turns to burglary out of a sense that they have no other way to a workable standard of living is cast as lazy and/or greedy, because to see them as despairing seems to foreclose salving feelings of injury by punishing them. Likewise, despite mountains of evidence to the contrary, there is still a widespread understanding that addiction comes from a lack of willpower or other personal moral/ethical failing, rather than being a means of coping with difficulties in life.

My personal conclusion is that suicide is something that people care about. The belief that stories about suicide and suicidal ideation encourage the same (as if people would never think of such things on their own) dies hard, and journalistic outlets understand that they may be blamed if someone kills themselves and it's found that they read an article without an attendant anti-suicide message. And I don't begrudge people their caring, or their choices of what to care about, and what not to. I do wonder, however, if a greater show of caring for other matters may be effective in blunting their impacts on society.