I worked hard in 2011 to pull my wife back from suicide while I tried to carry on running my business. She came close more than once. I've supported her closely through the patchy public mental health system, private therapy and so on. [And she's in a better place now, but I don't stop watching]
It's interesting that you and someone else here don't recognise those symptoms. But when I deconstruct my wife's experience of suicidal ideation, the article's summary match what I observed pretty closely, in terms of the escalation. She left her job due to latent anxiety, had mental health issues, blamed herself strongly, this turned out to stem from a teenage trauma I'd known nothing about. There more anxiety, drinking, an overdose and a very scary amount of "disinhibition". In the end a 3-day stay in a secure ward and lots of drugs was the start of a slow recovery.
It doesn't describe her mental state. I don't think I knew it well enough, and I'm not sure she'd be able to tell it to you, as your own pain is clearly hard enough to put into words.
But from the outside, I know what I saw, and that article covers. If you know or support someone with mental health problems, you'd do well to think about their behaviour in terms of those categories.
It's interesting that you and someone else here don't recognise those symptoms. But when I deconstruct my wife's experience of suicidal ideation, the article's summary match what I observed pretty closely, in terms of the escalation. She left her job due to latent anxiety, had mental health issues, blamed herself strongly, this turned out to stem from a teenage trauma I'd known nothing about. There more anxiety, drinking, an overdose and a very scary amount of "disinhibition". In the end a 3-day stay in a secure ward and lots of drugs was the start of a slow recovery.
It doesn't describe her mental state. I don't think I knew it well enough, and I'm not sure she'd be able to tell it to you, as your own pain is clearly hard enough to put into words.
But from the outside, I know what I saw, and that article covers. If you know or support someone with mental health problems, you'd do well to think about their behaviour in terms of those categories.
[an HN regular with a throwaway account]