Suicide prevention question
Posted: Thu Jul 14, 2005 2:54 am
I wanted to ask if anyone has any experience preventing someone bent on committing suicide from actually doing it using only homeopathic remedies as treatment.
Someone we know, who has been depressed with suicidal thoughts for a long time, has now failed out of school after his second year in law school -- primarily because he was already very depressed. He has been very unhappy at this school, but has also gotten deeply into debt to pay for it, and if they do not accept his appeal to be reinstated provisionally and make up the work he did poorly on, he sees no other way out than suicide.
He refuses to see a psychiatrist or take medications. He has his plans all made, and is waiting to see if they accept him back.
Constitutionally, Hyoscyamus was indicated a couple of months ago, and he was willing to take it as a way to feel not quite so miserable while he was waiting to find out the ruling. Hyoscyamus has worked well for him in many ways, but while he continues to take it, he has also refined his plans for suicide and his sense of the inevitability of it -- that he has to do it. This is not a direction of cure.
He plans to hang himself, in a way that causes problems for the school through negative publicity -- revenge. But his original underlying motivation was a delusion that only bad things can happen to him, and the only way out is to kill himself. He's doesn't feel guilty, just singled out (not by any single agent) for persecution, I guess you'd call it.
Among the bad things that have happened is a string of refusals by girls to go out with him, which had obsessed him up to the time of the law school debacle -- his reaction to that led to the Hyos as a prescription. Based on the determination to hang himself and his absolute conviction that he has to commit suicide, with the underpinning of financial distress as well as despair, I asked him to take Ars, 200c which he says "settled his stomach, "then 1M, (Unfortunately, I can't get him to acknowledge any physical symptoms in any direct way -- so there hasn't been a whole lot to go on -- nothing like a complete case. He'll only talk about how he feels for a couple of minutes at a time, with long intervals in between). Aside from his stomach, Ars hasn't helped with his energy or feelings of despair at all.
I gave him Aur 200c today, with 1M in reserve. But I had already given him Aur two years ago, when he first told us about his suicidal thoughts, and it did nothing for him then -- so I'm not optimistic about it. He continues to take Hyos 12c most days, because he finds it comforts him. However, I'm sure the Hyos is palliative, since at the same time his emotional picture has gotten dramatically worse. This person is not a client of mine, not under regular homeopathic treatment -- I've just been trying, when the occasion has presented itself, to help prevent him from actually carrying out his plan, if at all possible.
We've gotten him to promise to talk anonymously with a suicide hotline before he actually commits the act, which I expect will happen before the end of July -- within the next 2-3 weeks. The basis for this was as a favor to his friends, to help make us feel a little better maybe... (Yeah, right.).
We've gotten advice from several experienced psychiatrists as well as trained suicide prevention personnel on what are the possible measures to take that would not be counterproductive, and we have done everything possible in that area. So my question is not about the other measures to take, but really focuses on the homeopathic possibilities in such an extreme circumstance, where a person has an absolutely firm delusional basis for suicide, a lifelong history of depression, and a strong immediate motivation for killing himself now rather than later. All the suicide prevention professionals we've talked to have had to concede that if a person is absolutely determined to take his or her own life, s/he will ultimately do it, no matter what external measures people try to apply to prevent it. The only potential solution I can see is trying to dissolve or soften the underlying delusion if that's possible with a remedy. He's not willing at all to concede rationally that the problem is a delusion or that it's not necessarily permanent and unchanging.
Thanks. Rosemary
[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
Someone we know, who has been depressed with suicidal thoughts for a long time, has now failed out of school after his second year in law school -- primarily because he was already very depressed. He has been very unhappy at this school, but has also gotten deeply into debt to pay for it, and if they do not accept his appeal to be reinstated provisionally and make up the work he did poorly on, he sees no other way out than suicide.
He refuses to see a psychiatrist or take medications. He has his plans all made, and is waiting to see if they accept him back.
Constitutionally, Hyoscyamus was indicated a couple of months ago, and he was willing to take it as a way to feel not quite so miserable while he was waiting to find out the ruling. Hyoscyamus has worked well for him in many ways, but while he continues to take it, he has also refined his plans for suicide and his sense of the inevitability of it -- that he has to do it. This is not a direction of cure.
He plans to hang himself, in a way that causes problems for the school through negative publicity -- revenge. But his original underlying motivation was a delusion that only bad things can happen to him, and the only way out is to kill himself. He's doesn't feel guilty, just singled out (not by any single agent) for persecution, I guess you'd call it.
Among the bad things that have happened is a string of refusals by girls to go out with him, which had obsessed him up to the time of the law school debacle -- his reaction to that led to the Hyos as a prescription. Based on the determination to hang himself and his absolute conviction that he has to commit suicide, with the underpinning of financial distress as well as despair, I asked him to take Ars, 200c which he says "settled his stomach, "then 1M, (Unfortunately, I can't get him to acknowledge any physical symptoms in any direct way -- so there hasn't been a whole lot to go on -- nothing like a complete case. He'll only talk about how he feels for a couple of minutes at a time, with long intervals in between). Aside from his stomach, Ars hasn't helped with his energy or feelings of despair at all.
I gave him Aur 200c today, with 1M in reserve. But I had already given him Aur two years ago, when he first told us about his suicidal thoughts, and it did nothing for him then -- so I'm not optimistic about it. He continues to take Hyos 12c most days, because he finds it comforts him. However, I'm sure the Hyos is palliative, since at the same time his emotional picture has gotten dramatically worse. This person is not a client of mine, not under regular homeopathic treatment -- I've just been trying, when the occasion has presented itself, to help prevent him from actually carrying out his plan, if at all possible.
We've gotten him to promise to talk anonymously with a suicide hotline before he actually commits the act, which I expect will happen before the end of July -- within the next 2-3 weeks. The basis for this was as a favor to his friends, to help make us feel a little better maybe... (Yeah, right.).
We've gotten advice from several experienced psychiatrists as well as trained suicide prevention personnel on what are the possible measures to take that would not be counterproductive, and we have done everything possible in that area. So my question is not about the other measures to take, but really focuses on the homeopathic possibilities in such an extreme circumstance, where a person has an absolutely firm delusional basis for suicide, a lifelong history of depression, and a strong immediate motivation for killing himself now rather than later. All the suicide prevention professionals we've talked to have had to concede that if a person is absolutely determined to take his or her own life, s/he will ultimately do it, no matter what external measures people try to apply to prevent it. The only potential solution I can see is trying to dissolve or soften the underlying delusion if that's possible with a remedy. He's not willing at all to concede rationally that the problem is a delusion or that it's not necessarily permanent and unchanging.
Thanks. Rosemary
[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]