In Cherished79’s excellent account of one of her suicide attempt (http://cherished79.wordpress.com/2007/07/05/suicide-the-taboo-word/), she described how she was planning to kill herself in the hospital, left the hospital, went home and executed her plan. That means her doctor and the ward staff was confident that she was no longer a danger to herself. I am sure that healthy people have no idea how often suicidal people lie about their feelings, and just how easy it is to do it.
I have given this some thought. Are we so good at covering up our intentions? Perhaps, but could it just as well be that in everyone’s need to avoid confronting the reality of our situation, they optimistically choose to believe we are much better than the facts support? I think on a day to day basis, this is probably the more likely scenario. Lesson: try to observe your suicidal loved ones as objectively as you can if you want to really be there for them.
As for doctors, I think we do put on our game faces and in doing so, we can seem healthy enough to leave, if indeed not completely healthy. And, how do we accomplish such a feat? Practice. As with anything, projecting a personna of compitence and stability is only a matter of practice. The truth is most of us (suicidal folk) have been suicidal for so long prior to acting on it, that we have a lot of practice in covering up how we feel. This goes back to my first point because we must have been bad at it in the beginning. It is only through apathy or wishful thinking that those around us did not pick up on it before we gained the experience required to fool the best.
Or, maybe we are just born thespians. BTW, I am in no danger of harming myself anymore….
