Recognizing the Warning Signs of Suicide

There are three main warning signs to recognize if a friend or relative are suicidal. If you recognize these "classic symptoms" then you may be able to prevent their suicide.

1: If you recognize severe depression in this person that is leading to the feeling of futility in everything in their lives including living then also recognize this as a warning sign.

2: Is your friend or relative giving away everything they own that is important to them? This also should set off your alarms. It means their suicide is imminent and they wish to make sure that their friends and family members have things to remember them by.

3: Another classic symptom is that they are setting their financial affairs in order. This is another main warning sign as it indicates that their plan is ready to go and they want to be sure to leave their family with all the information necessary to handle legal and financial matters. They do not want their own family or their extended family to worry about burial expenses, life insurance policies or how to handle the money for paying bills when they are gone.

Is your friend or relative giving away everything that they own? Is your friend or relative organizing all their finances? Does their severe depression pose futility type feelings? Does this set off alarms in you? It should! Does this mean your friend or relative is contemplating their suicide? This is probably so and if you alarms tell you this you CAN do something about this before it happens.

My brother actually has a plan. He actually has laid out and voiced that the depression gets so bad that sometimes he just wants to drive his car off of the road into a ditch where there are some very large trees. This makes me think that he has a specific place planned for this. When she heard this, my mother called me, as I deal with severe depression amongst other mental illness issues compounded with physical ailments.

Resources for emergencies:

In the front of your phone book are numbers for youth crisis, adult crisis and mental health crisis hotlines.

NAMI (National Alliance for Mental Illness) can offer you brochures to peruse in order to seek out the warning signs. Please be sure to order some of their brochures on depression in order to better understand and assist a person with severe depression and suicidal tendancies.

I called a couple of these numbers to see what my mother or I could do to save my brother. They informed me to watch out for him to give away all those things important to him. This is a classic "warning sign" and another also setting their financial affairs in order. Other than that they stated "If he has a plan already set, there is probably nothing you can do to prevent it!"

Mind you, nothing we could do! Just sit back and wait! I don't think so. You can try to prevent it if the person is only setting out a plan to get your attention that they are that desperate. Such as was the case of my brother. Don't ever think that there is nothing you can do.

Some suicidal people do not have a plan but have warning signs of severe depression that give them a sense of futility in their lives. These are the people that your alarms should be going off for. The futility of living life is a forerunner of warning signs in a suicidal person.

Secondly, and foremost, are the facts that this person is giving away their prized possessions and restoring their financial affairs to such an order that anyone they leave behind can figure them out and do what they deem necessary financially.

Once you see these signs you can make sure that you spend more time with this person. Talk to them ALOT! Make them get their feelings out in the open. This is a hunt and peck mission but you can find out alot by talking and can usually eek out what it is that bothers them the most about their lives. Then you can most assuredly help them in resolving their issues. Suggesting counseling (therapy) is a good way to get them not to follow through on their plan. Usually they are not accomodating enough to accept that they need therapy but once you explain that what they state to a therapist doesn't go anywhere they can see the value in talking with someone outside of friends and family.

My grandfather had a well laid plan of going into the woods with a gun and never coming back. When he voiced that he had this plan laid out he was talked to by several members in the family. Just visiting and talking to him made him realize that he had a large family and alot of friends that he could depend on and he is now 83! This was not the first plan that he had but realizing that friends and family would miss him, he didn't follow through.

Support, support, and more support is what a suicidal person needs. Do not ignore someone with mental illnesses including the most severe depression. If you can't handle talking to a friend or relative in this condition then find someone who can. Surely there is someone who understands this and is not uncomfortable with it that will visit the suicidal person and talk to them. They will more than likely get the suicidal person to open up enough to realize that things really don't look that bad.

Prevention is a hard thing to do but can be done. Again I say "support, support and more support" is a key factor in getting them to realize that there is something to live for. Recognizing the above three main pre-cursors are the biggest factor in assisting someone in preventing their suicide.

Do not fear calling a mental health crisis hotline as the more details that you can give them the less likely you will hear something like "they probably won't be able to be helped other than watching for more symptoms!" The hotlines are a great resource for finding out other ways to prevent suicides depending on your particular situation and the warning signs that you have come to recognize.

Of course, each person has their own individualized warning signs. Watch out for unusual behaviors. Organization of things that they don't normally organize. Depression, the number one issue with suicide, watch out for that. You know what your friend or relative's demeanor is on a normal basis. Should your alarms go off, FOR ANY REASON, there is a reason that they are going off. PLEASE HEED THEM. You, as a friend or relative, have alarms that go off because you are sending things are out of the "norm" and those alarms are a very good warning sign to you that something is wrong and that you should be there for that person. Do not allow yourself to dismiss these alarms. You know them well enough to know that these alarms mean something.