NAMI (the National Alliance on Mental Illness) has a toll-free national suicide hotline at 800-950-6264. But that's just one of many available. Wikipedia has a huge list of suicide hotlines all over the world, including about a dozen in the US. If you call one and they seem unhelpful, you can just go on to try the next one on the list.

When I was really suicidal, I feared that talking about it with my shrink could have gotten me locked up, but I think I made a big mistake not discussing my situation with a suicide hotline. Even though they would have just tried to talk me out of it, that doesn't mean they wouldn't have come up with perfectly valid arguments. Your cell phone has GPS in it, so they'll know where you are and maybe send the cops to grab you and lock you up, but they definitely won't do that unless you tell them that you've settled on a definite plan of how you're going to do it.

I knew a bipolar woman from a support group who would call the local suicide hotline every day before she went to work. She came from a very accomplished, high-achieving family, and had failed out of college due to her bipolar illness and was generally considered the failure of the family, and the pressure from them was hard for her to bear. The people on the hotline knew her very well, they were on a first-name basis.

Thinking back on it, wanting to kill myself because I was much less intelligent than before was really stupid. Lots of people have low IQ's and have reasonably meaningful lives.

I could have gone and been a lumberjack -- years later, there was a TV show, "Axe Men", about lumberjacks. Work outside, pretty exciting work -- exciting enough that they made a TV show about it. It's dangerous, but that's not a big deterrent to someone who's suicidal. My great-grandfather was a lumberjack.

Not being an intellectual any more would mean that I would mostly have to find new friends to hang out with, but that's not the end of the world. I hardly had any friends at the time, so starting over from scratch wouldn't have been a big loss anyway.

The Mormon Church made a bunch of videos about the lives of individual Mormons. Each video is about 5 minutes long. They don't discuss their religion a lot, the purpose of the videos is to say "We're reasonable people, and we have decent lives, don't hate us." They're interesting videos, because they discuss people having adapted to a wide range of challenges. Here's one about a guy who got hit by a car and his head cracked open when he was 4 years old, leaving him with lifelong learning disabilities:

Even though this guy isn't terribly book-smart, he's made an enviable, heroic life for himself. He's able to support himself, he's got a cute wife, he's got kids, and he's doing worthwhile charity work.

Eventually I got some cyanide. I felt better knowing that I was equipped to kill myself if I wanted to, but I wasn't in enough short-term pain to do the deed.

Right around that time I switched from Topamax to other meds, and my IQ went back up. So that removed most of the motivation to do it. I still thought about suicide every day as a distant thought. My life by that point was really mediocre but far from horrible, I really didn't have much justification for wanting to kill myself, but I'd just gotten into a bad habit of fixating on the idea.

Eventually things got a bit better and I decided that if I wanted to participate in society, and have people trust me enough to be straight with me, I owed it to them not to keep death at my fingertips like that.

I got rid of the cyanide as a New Year's resolution.

My life is now so much better that a serious thought of suicide hasn't so much as crossed my mind for about a decade and a half.

Some cops are ready to talk people out of suicide. Once, I had a roommate who had crazy theories about the stock market and lost everything that way while unemployed. He went to the bank to make a withdrawal and the teller told him he had no money in his account. He said "OK, then I'm going to kill myself." and left the bank. The teller knew who he was by this point so she called the cops. The cops came to our apartment and had a conversation with him about it.

At the time, I had cyanide in my own bedroom. I had no idea how I could talk anybody else out of it. This cop somehow had a world view where he felt qualified to talk to anybody, in any situation, and somehow offer constructive advice to discourage them from killing themselves.

(I don't know the specifics of the conversation the cops had with my roommate because they went out to the driveway and talked there where I couldn't hear.)

I can't convince you to never, ever commit suicide no matter what. But I do feel that if you do commit suicide, you owe it to everybody else to leave a note explaining why.

In 1990 I attempted suicide based on a crazy manic conversation with the almighty. I didn't leave a note. If I had died, it would have been a big burden on all my friends, leaving them wondering if they were personally responsible. If I had somehow composed a note, it would have been pretty clear that I was out of my mind and the action was no fault of theirs.

Part of the reason I didn't leave a note was that my thoughts weren't really coherent enough to compose one. In fairness, I think the fact that I wasn't competent to write a note was a pretty compelling argument that I wasn't competent to decide to end my life.

Some people try to kill themselves in their car.

In the documentary The Insurrectionist Next Door they tell the story of a 21-year-old girl who went to the Jan 6th demonstration with her uncle, who was a Proud Boy. She had been cooped-up for a year in the pandemic and just saw the trip as a chance to get out of town. She wasn't particularly political really. But she got doxxed and was being prosecuted afterward, but she got canceled on social media in her hometown. A lot of her friends quit being her friends, and she was getting a lot of hate mail, so she got off social media altogether, which meant she lost touch with the people who still would've been her friends and was completely isolated in the pandemic, and got increasingly depressed and turned to alcohol.

Eventually she was drunk and drove the wrong way on the freeway. The movie doesn't say whether she was too drunk to know what she was doing or making a deliberate suicide attempt. She hit somebody head-on, killing them. She was unscathed. When she was interviewed in the movie, she was going to be prosecuted, and her manner and demeanor suggested someone who was just sad to be alive.

Another woman I met in a support group said that, when she was manic and driving a car, she heard a voice saying to just close her eyes and floor the accelerator, which she did. She hit somebody, killing two kids. She was uninjured, prosecuted, and sent to prison. The case was covered on the press and she was on TV, which the prisoners in prison saw before she got there, and they were the worst offenders, including killers, some of whom had life sentences, and they beat her up all the time to punish her for what she did.

We're having a lot of mass-shooters shoot a lot of people, usually a lot of innocent people, and I think most of them intend to eventually be killed or kill themselves, though some of them survive to face justice. Evidently they have grudges toward the whole world and want to get even with reality on their way out. Typically mass-shooters wind up killing as many or more friends than foes.

When I was in suicide chat rooms, I suggested to everybody that if we were to shoot ourselves in the head, we should do it lying down on the grass so the bullet, after going through the head, is buried in the ground, rather than doing it in an apartment with the possibility that the bullet would continue through the wall and hit somebody in the next apartment who was enjoying life. Several people totally disagreed with that, saying that they would like to line several people they were angry at in line to be hit by the bullet after them.

People committing suicide very, very frequently change their minds at the last minute. Lots of people who jump off the Golden Gate Bridge and survive say they changed their minds about dying while falling (then when they hit the water they break their spine and are paralyzed for life, and they still want to live). So if you choose to kill yourself in a way that winds up harming others, there is a very, very good chance that your attempt at death will fail, you'll change your mind about dying, and you'll survive to face justice. On top of that, there's no sure way to know what happens after you die, and most religions in the world predict that after death, you will be held accountable for your actions.

One theory I have is that when someone attempts suicide, the afterlife they wind up in is one where they survive to face punishment for their actions.

An essay by Rachel Drane, who had been close to suicide about a year previously, describing the year she had after choosing to live. If I had died a year ago.