I do use a therapist, but I think that I would probably stop if I didn’t feel like my therapist was my cheerleader, someone who really is just trying to make sure I’m safe and help me get past the things that stop me from being an effective person. I am lucky to have the privilege of discontinuing therapy whenever I want (in fact I had to fight to get it), and that pretty fundamentally alters what “therapy” means to me.

Especially as an activist, you need to be able to stand firmly on your ground. People seem to think that by taking other people’s emotions into account and addressing their perspectives that you’re all of a sudden supposed to walk on eggshells anytime we bring up something that needs to be addressed. Yeah, I’ll preface that most people seeking a cure for autism are indeed trying to do the good thing. But that doesn’t mean I’m going to apologize for opposing cure because I’m making someone “feel like a bad parent” even when I didn’t make any such insulting claim, but rather explained my perspective and why it’s so important that it be listened to, that we can’t take things lying down, no matter how good the intentions. What was that saying, again, about the pavement of the road to hell…?

http://www.feminist-reprise.org/docs/cardea.htm is the functioning link now.

http://feminist-reprise.org/docs/kitzinger.htm is a functioning link, appears to be the document in question.

http://feminist-reprise.org/docs/therapism.htm works for that.

(And while I don’t mind being a sounding board for friends, or holding them as they cry during a crisis, I cannot be in therapist mode for my friends. It doesn’t work for anyone involved.)

Oh yeah, and the method/means thing, when I was in the ward my panties were confiscated because I could hang myself with them. I had no idea, an orderly told me this. I’ve never looked at panties the same way!

Not everyone’s going to tell you that they’ve got any of these things, even if they do. Not everyone’s even got a known method or means even if they’re really going to kill themselves.

And if they do have these things, it doesn’t mean they’re going to kill themselves.

One of my shrinks in the past tried to get people to figure out every possible way they could kill themselves by looking around a room. (The guy was twisted in several dimensions, this is the least of it.)

This means that, right now, I could find “method” and “means” in almost any situation, regardless of whether I have “motive”. I have extensive training, the guy would point things out if people didn’t notice them. I know how to kill myself in just about any situation where I’m not either immobilized or otherwise being physically prevented from doing so, and that includes not just one but several possible plans, almost without thinking about it.

But it also means that the instant I acquire “motive,” then if I disclose the fact that I have all these methods at my disposal, I become a much higher “suicide risk” supposedly.

The time when I lost all remaining scraps of naivete about the psych system, I was persuaded by a worker at a suicide hotline to check into a psych ward overnight voluntarily — the next day I would be able to easily get other preventative measures in place at home, but for various reasons, not that day. I not only ended up in the psych ward because my extensive knowledge of methods and means impressed the suicide hotline worker, but I ended up tricked into an involuntary hold.

If I hadn’t had someone around to take me out against medical advice, there’s a good chance I probably really would have died there. (Not from suicide, though. I just know how that particular psych ward operates — lots of forced drugging with drugs I’m very allergic to with pretty much no provocation, total ignoring of drug allergies even in people whose throats are swollen half-shut.) And they had a really hard time believing that just as I’d checked in to prevent my death, I was also checking out to prevent my death. (They even accused me of not really wanting to kill myself if I didn’t want to stay for three days.)

Extensive knowledge of how to kill myself says little about my likelihood to actually do so. Other people don’t necessarily have a plan, but will impulsively figure one out on the spot the moment before they carry out that plan. I could come up with dozens of plans this instant, some of them incredibly easy, based on the room I’m in — and I can do this almost without thinking.

I bet that even if I said that I didn’t really want to die, the sheer multitude of my descriptions of exactly how I could die if I wanted to would convince most psychiatric professionals that I was just concealing motive, rather than lacking it altogether.