Hey! I work for a suicide line!
This is 100% accurate! Debt relief, housing, and just generally human beings not having to sacrifice their minds and bodies for basic necessities would cut down the suicide rate by tons!
Storytime! I was overnight charge nurse of an acute inpatient psychiatric unit every single night I worked (3/7 days a week) for over a year with a full set of patients every night the same as any other nurse working each of those nights except I also had to make sure all the unit administrative tasks got done (some of which would be critiqued by the incoming shift, particularly the assignment / patient split I made for the next shift).
I was really really good at it. I’ve been working high acuity units for years including specialized units for patients facing legal charges so I know how to handle some really violent patients but I’ve also been an inpatient myself more than once so I know how to approach a lot of issues with a lot more …understanding? I guess? Than most. I was really good at it. Even when I wasn’t charge nurse I’d wind up taking care of other people’s patients so their patients wigging out wouldn’t start affecting my patients or for bigger incidents half the time I was the only person that even knew what to do.
But then comes the “we can’t assign anyone else because you’re the best at it.” Well if I’m going to be the dedicated charge nurse can I not have my own patients? Well no we don’t have the staff for that. Well can I go work another unit for just one day each week? Can I go work the clinical liason team and respond to behavioral codes in the hospitals medical units? Well no we need you here. And so on an and so on.
And then they start telling me I need to tighten up on my night shift. Don’t let them hide in the nurses station but they’re not allowed to take anything on the unit to make them comfortable out there even if they keep track of it all carefully. Make sure they do every single round and and it doesn’t matter if that wakes the patients up every fifteen minutes (and on top of everything else you’re doing you personally need to make sure each person is doing their checks every fifteen minutes). Make sure they clean the whole unit every night. Audit their charting and make sure they’re not missing anything.
I lost 40 pounds at that job by the time the supervisor came into the nurses station in the middle of morning report to yell at me about not doing it right. I handed her my badge and left.
The entire time people were offering to listen, to be there for me emotionally. We work in mental health and sometimes you just need someone to listen, right? I had plenty of people listening but no one was helping. Even when I was explicitly offering specific ways to just lighten up on me a little, they said no. They even blocked my attempts to apply to other units in the hospital. Every single night I worked it was like having my head shoved under water and the dread I felt every day before work was literally making me physically ill.
Listening only goes so far.
If people are willing to listen but not actually to address your concerns, they don’t actually care what you have to say.
I’m sorry to hear about your experience working at such a place. It’s no wonder that the industry ends up devoid of both empathy and efficacy when it actively screens out such qualities, if not in intent then in practice. For the time you were able to endure despite the impossible demands and pressure, I hope you were a ray of sunshine for those patients you were able to help.
“It’s not ineffectual whining on social media it’s SpReAdInG AwArEnEsS!!”
Decades of experience has revealed the overwhelming majority of ‘suicide prevention’ concepts are exclusively focused and fixated on acute suicidality, which are often precisely the opposite of what’s required when dealing with chronic suicidality.
One of the most effective mechanisms, particularly for chronic suicide prevention, is to create an environment in which one can realistically and actively choose to participate in when we’re at our most vulnerable.
Obviously, the best way to treat someone who is desperate to the point that they want to die is to strip them of their rights, put them in essentially a prison, and traumatize them even more.
I went inpatient voluntarily a few months ago. When I asked to leave, they got an order to hold me. I had vape smoke blown in my face by their staff, was physically assaulted, and was placed in a woman’s ward - despite being legally male and having had surgery to that effect.
The carceral approach to suicide prevention is horrifying and helps no one.
“It’s not actually a good thing to be well adjusted in a deeply sick society”
Money implies poverty.
-Iain M Banks
Yes, but also if you have the time or inclination you can still volunteer.
The above is a list of resources like free food fridges, reproductive health and other outreach.
I like to cope by doing absolutely too much for one person, so I’ve learned to spread that around to many people! I’m fine, this is fine, 4 hours of sleep a night is totally sustainable.
Using “mental health awareness” to victim blame is a proper cunt move.
Thoughts and prayers!
Mental health awareness enables class consciousness. Please don’t do this.
I think the thing being advocated here is using context, not stopping talking about issues.
Like instead of saying “you are not alone with burnout, it is something most people experience from time to time”, say " you’re not alone with burnout, it is the result of the alienation from your work and the incentive structure of our society".
“Deaths of despair” is a powerful concept which deserves whatever shove into the mainstream that it can be given, regardless of purity tests. Occupy had problems, but it still got people to take on the concept of “the 1%.”
Can you expand your sentences a bit? I don’t think I understand it quite yet.
Glad to. I think the more valuable story to tell people is about the thread connecting deaths of despair, and it’s the story that will be resisted. Shitty liberal tendencies will tend to tell the easier story as a way to obscure the hard one, and they’ll tell it louder if you call them out on their hypocrisy. This is not to say mental health awareness is an easier conversation at all, but the wider concept of “deaths of despair” touches it and ties it to something bigger, and is the more potent thought to leave people with.
The Occupy Wall Street movement had problems with staying on message and not making concrete demands, among other critiques folks to their left might make. However, they introduced the powerful concept that 1% of Americans control more than a third of American wealth, and the idea of “the 1%” does tremendous good and will long outlive the other conversations within that movement.
A major value of online discourse is to teach ourselves to perceive deeper threads in situations like what I’ve mentioned, and to obliterate our own blind spots when they stand in the way. That is what I was trying to say, and thank you sincerely for being an engaged discussion partner!
After a certain point being aware just means you keep reaching the lucky 10,000 instead of actually doing anything to address the problems.
It’s like all the charities that are doing all kinds of stuff to raise awareness for whatever problem they’re championing, but hardly ever make a dent in furthering the goal of actually fixing what they’re championing.
Yes keeping people informed about mental health problems is important but the solution to the rise of the mental health crisis is “fix what’s causing so much unnecessary stress on people.” But instead we get more money dedicated for researching medicines and therapy to fix what shouldn’t have been broken in the first place.
“Raisin awareness” more often than not helps that Charity in terms of Marketing, which in turn leads to more funding.
(Finding a human interest subject, linking your company to it and taking it all the the Press as a nice pre-package piece of “today’s news” is quite a common PR strategy)
When it comes to modern Charities, generally fixing what they’re championing is at best a secondary priority to their own self-preservation as an entity.
Medical professionals can be particularly ignorant when it comes to the day to day life problems of their patients. I think it’s completely inappropriate to tell someone like a single mother on low income that her mood swings are just the result of some syndrome, can be managed with chemicals and is totally disconnected from the trouble in her life. Therapists will call her entitled for continuing to experience emotion. It’s sick.
There is no easy answer with the shit knuckles we have in power.
- The number one thing everyone must do: Create a real world budget. Use excel, learn how to create the basic addition algo’s in the cells, add every single penny spent into the spreadsheet. This is easy if you mostly use a card because every expense is listed in your account. Set the budget up for an entire year, one row one paycheck, left to right, expenses top ro bottom, you know when rent, and car insurance is due, and paychecks are coming in, you know how much you will bring in if you work 40hrs a week, and if that changes you change the cell to match reality. Have a full years worth of every single expense, you might take a month or two until you have entered every single reoccurring expense, but once completed you know how much is due by when and how much money you exactly have. This can be stressful, but you can’t fix anything until you know exactly what is happening from an expenses standpoint not a survival one.
- Cut spending on reoccurring expenses. Cut streaming services, get your movies from the library if you have one that has a selection of newer movies(a lot do now). Buy as much groceries as you can on sale, you will always get ridiculous amounts of food if you only shop sales, some things like milk can’t be bought on sale, when it is on sale, buy as much as possible and freeze it. Once you have a supply of food built up, get a full size freezer, you literally need a full size freezer so much you should go into debt to get one. Now fill that full size freezer with food that is on sale. Literally within a month the money you save on food easily pays for the payment on the freezer. Downside, every meal must be cooked at home. The upside, full meals can cost around $1-$2 per mouth fed per meal, freeze the food that can be frozen and make smaller amounts of the food that goes mushy when frozen, and that will include meat, vegetables, pasta, and or rice, or other staple foods, this is even if you’re single but some one off items can throw the final price higher like if you don’t like freezing vegetables after cooking them and are in a situation where a specific amount which is too much for you, is the minimum amount you can cook.
- Getting meal cost down to the $1 range, removing and reoccurring expenses that you don’t need… Netflix might be super useful for helping kids stay busy for a single parent so do what works for you, but where possible, look for cheaper or free alternatives like setting up your own media server and putting your own movies and shows on it and spending no money on streaming services. -A 5yr old computer can using jellyfin can stream 4k content to a roku streaming stick if the file is encoded to compatible settings first. 1080p it can transcode on the fly pretty easily. (Reuse an old PC to replace streaming using a free app like jellyfin)
- look ahead for car repairs, know what maintenance is required annually for your car, save as much as you can to put towards requirements, then look online for what parts are going out on other people with the same car. Find avg costs for those repairs. Expect those repairs WILL be required and then never touch that money until the repairs are required. That money is gone unfortunately but you get to stay on the road. With the savings from food alone you can hopefully put something towards repairs and maintenance. If you are lucky the repairs won’t be required for awhile and you can save enough to just pay for them without using a credit card. You might be able to save money by setting up an unconnected savings account then having $20 direct deposited from every paycheck, and just forget about it.
- Knowing exactly the situation of your budget is the first step to making life easier. If you’re in the red $500 a month then you have the proof right there. You know you need more money, or cut expenses. There is no in between, but at least you know how much more you need not just some intangible number you imagine you can never achieve.
A lot of words for budget.
