>It should help to know that reaching the state of being one smile away from suicide implies a profoundly severe illness
That's a pretty harsh and unrealistic generalization. Not everyone who commits or wants to commit suicide is "profoundly mentally ill". If you woke up tomorrow and your bank account were empty and your family were gone, would you consider suicide? Alot of people would, and it's not because they formed a mental defect overnight. Terrible things happen every day that can make otherwise rational people believe suicide is their most viable option.
Consideration of suicide is not the same thing as intrusive or deliberate and systemic suicidal planning. If it's a friend, ask: are you thinking about suicide? Do you have any plans? What are you thinking of doing? If there are plans, and they are credible, seek immediate medical attention.
> If you woke up tomorrow and your bank account were empty and your family were gone, would you consider suicide? Alot of people would, and it's not because they formed a mental defect overnight.
Not overnight, but this event might trigger clinical depression which is a mental illness in which suicide might appear as a "viable" (sic!) option.
Suicide is simply not the response of a healthy individual in the scenario you described. One would either fight, flight or freeze without willingly harm oneself.
Suicide is the ultimate form of flight. It's running away from life itself. To a depressed person suicide isn't self-harm, it's a way to stop the pain.
That's what makes it so dangerous. Because in reality it IS self harm, it's just that suicidal people can't truly understand that. And it's also true that it's an escape, and the pain stops when you're dead. The value system is distorted such that the loss of all positive feelings isn't weighed properly. Especially since depressed people tend to have far fewer positive feelings, and have a confirmation bias to be unable to remember those feelings existing.
It wasn't a philosophical problem for me. It wasn't that my value system was distorted, it was that my entire experience of existing was distorted. I could logically affirm that positive experiences are possible all I wanted, but they were somehow profoundly remote, in a parallel universe that I could vaguely remember but no longer existed in. It's not just that I had confirmation bias and fewer positive experiences, it's that my entire perception of everything -- every thought, every experience, every future possibility -- was so warped that positive experiences seemed like an impossible fantasy. More than once, I overcame a tremendous amount of lethargy and pessimism and tried to have a positive experience, and I simply couldn't experience it as positive, no matter how good it "should" have been.
That is the power of having a seriously screwed up brain. My symptoms improved not with antidepressants or psychotherapy or self-help, but with treatment for a previously undiagnosed chronic physiological condition. Despite having a "real illness", I've found validation for most of my experiences in first-hand accounts of people with "mental illness" (which is defined in such a way that the practical definition is "any psychological symptoms not explained by a lab test known to your GP"). Allie Brosh was mentioned by another commenter, and I definitely had a "holy crap, someone else gets it" moment when reading her "Adventures in Depression" comics.
(I'm being a little vague here, but given the still-extant stigma around "mental illness" and the amount of data collection that is now commonplace, I'm a bit paranoid about revealing enough to identify myself even under a throwaway account)
After ~20 years of on-and-off psychiatric treatment (some fairly intensive, some not, none especially effective), I found a psychiatrist with enough sense to strongly recommend that I get the relevant lab test. He had to tell me to request it from my primary care doc, because according to the worldview of American health insurance a psychiatrist is not qualified to order said lab test. My primary care doc gave me a questionnaire. My score was just below the threshold where the lab test is considered warranted. He told me he'd figure out how to make it work. I guess he did, because I got the test, got it interpreted by ${DOMAIN_EXPERT}, and got a prescription for treatment that seems to be working pretty well (albeit not perfectly).
That's a pretty harsh and unrealistic generalization. Not everyone who commits or wants to commit suicide is "profoundly mentally ill". If you woke up tomorrow and your bank account were empty and your family were gone, would you consider suicide? Alot of people would, and it's not because they formed a mental defect overnight. Terrible things happen every day that can make otherwise rational people believe suicide is their most viable option.