The Shock Response to a Suicide Attempt An attempted suicide can be such a shock to the thinking and emotional system that a natural emotional numbing often occurs.
The conscious and unconscious minds combine to block access to each other to prevent the overall experience re-surfacing.
This is a useful reaction to have in the short term if it protects us long enough for us to transition to a safer environment.
In the long term it can prevent us from getting emotional trauma out of our bodies and the pain that drove the attempt can be in place for years afterwards.
If not accepted and released we can be left in a state of traumatic shock; a sense of wrongness goes on to affect the way we interpret all of our emotional responses from that point on.
This results in emotional blocking.
Over time we may forget the specific details that led to the attempt and stamp a superficial, usually self-critical spin on the experience so we do not have to go into our bodies to re-experience, release and analyse it fully.
It seems far easier to just blame ourselves than to accept the real external issues causing the pain.
The fact is our initial painful responses will be perfectly normal reactions to a painful environment which maybe we needed to deal with or leave, but for whatever reason did not want or know how to.
There is a risk involved in opening up this old wound though because what you are protecting yourself against is what I refer to as The Suicide Command.
This command is a powerful emotional response attached to a buried belief that says something along the lines of I cannot live with this or I cannot live without that.
This belief is so strong and the emotional response so powerful that it creates a delusional bubble that lives inside of us until we go into ourselves and pop it; releasing it for the false delusion it is.
Even years afterwards, when our life is now much happier and we know we should be at peace inside, this mini-horror story can still be threatening to us.
By thinking about the attempt in the right way and getting the support we need we can bring ourselves to a point where we feel safe in fully contacting with the impulses we initially experienced and then simultaneously release both the emotional pain attached and acknowledge and remove the beliefs that created and kept the traumatised response in place.
The work is time consuming and it is painful.
It does not have to be done as a perfect step by step system and should be regarded as a direction to go in.
If you have ever attempted suicide or support someone who has, the following information might help with the releasing process.
I believe attempted suicides are the result of a battle between our conscious minds wanting to have the emotional process work in a way it has been programmed by society to believe it should work, and the way nature has actually designed it to work.
Humans are mammals.
We were mammals before we were humans and this affects the design of our emotional system.
When we have an overwhelming emotional response we are designed to mentally shut down temporarily until the painful experience has passed by.
We are meant to become immobilised when temporarily helpless.
Mammalian Biology - the Immobilisation Response All mammals come with a built-in anaesthetising response known as the Immobilisation Response (also known as the Freezing or Disassociation Response).
This response is commonly seen in prey mammals being attacked by their natural predators and it sits in the middle of the behavioural range known as the fight or flight response.
Mammals who have never played the role of predator have little problem producing this immobilising response - for example an impala being chased by a cheetah may drop to the ground apparently helpless just before the cheetah reaches it.
If you were watching you might wonder why it just did that - you, of course, would continue to run until you could run no more.
Or would you? You might change your mind if you knew:
For the impala and other prey mammals this natural response is a blessing.
But for us it is a bit more confusing.
We humans do not like to lay down and act helpless.
Confused Humans as Both Prey and Predator Humans have a socially-programmed inner conflict when it comes to the Immobilisation Response because we are both biologically mammalian prey and yet psychologically designed to see ourselves as predators.
Whereas prey animals have learned to adopt only two strategies when their natural predators turn up (flee or freeze) humans have a variety of strategies they can use, including caging the predator or turning the predator into a pet.
We have an ability to re-contextualise a situation by having so many options to choose from.
If I were to ask you to choose whether or not you wish to regard yourself as a prey animal or a predator which would you choose? People have a default socially conditioned setting of wanting to be in control.
As a result we have a reluctance to go through the natural prey-under-attack emotional response cycle and we chastise others who do so because it mirrors what we feel deeply uncomfortable about.
Trauma occurs because we refuse to allow our mammalian biology to do its job.
Intense emotional pain can sometimes mimic the act of being eaten alive and because the unconscious does not know the difference between a real experience and a mental or imagined experience it may initiate the Immobilisation Response when we would rather it did not.
Depression Although not always the case, depression is regarded as the number one pre-requisite for a suicide attempt.
I believe depression is the result of a battle between the need to temporarily withdraw from a situation to allow the Immobilisation Response to clear the emotional system and the conscious thinking mind refusing to accept the process.
Studies of brain activity during depression show activity in the conscious brains (the two hemispheres that plan our way forward in the outer world) is greatly reduced.
We lose awareness of the outside world.
The state of consciousness changes and overall activity pulls back into the more primitive Mammalian Brain.
This leads to an experiencing of greater intensity of emotional ruminations which are present in our lower more primitive brains.
What this allows for, though, is the release of emotional pain.
But now our conscious minds, full of social programming telling us how we should always be happy, tries pulling us back from the process by consciously dragging ourselves out of it.
We become manic in our effort to become happier and attempt to reverse the process we do not want to go through.
We hate the idea that nature owns us.
Our egos are convinced nature cannot be trusted to do the job for us - we need to win.
There are four aspects to depression:
Unfortunately we are not socially trained to manage ourselves in this way and risk social rejection even if we do.
Socially Rejecting Environments Social acceptance is one of the most powerful needs people have (and I am sure most other mammals would regard it as important too) and it could be argued that all human pleasure responses are, at some point, linked in to the need for social acceptance.
Most of our lives are governed by the meanings involved in our relationships with others.
We are just made that way.
Conversely, social rejection (and the loss of someone close due to death is similar to such a rejection) can be extremely painful.
At a biological level we believe our very survival depends on social acceptance.
I have spoken to a lot of people suffering with depression, including several who have made suicide attempts, and in all cases the fear and sometimes the reality of social rejection, particularly by those we feel we should be closest to but are not, has been the underlying cause of their emotional problems.
The pain can be overwhelming when others are using the threat of social rejection as a power and punishment tactic to control our lives.
Ironically the response people often receive when they eventually make a suicide attempt due to the pain caused by social rejection is further social rejection.
We even start rejecting ourselves.
Two Case Studies I know a man who attempted suicide after his wife ended their relationship no fewer than six times just prior to their first child being born.
They had planned to have a child together for some time but as soon as she became pregnant she told him the relationship was over and she had regarded him only as a sperm provider.
He wanted to be a father and could not stand the idea of losing contact with the child and kept going back to the wife who kept rejecting him.
After several months of this he took an overdose of insulin tablets and was rushed to hospital.
Later when he was put in a bed on the ward the ward doctor told him off because the pills he had taken could not have killed him but they could have left him in a vegetative state.
The doctor went on to describe the kinds of drugs and dosages the man should take in order to kill himself so that next time he could succeed without burdening the state with having to look after his comatose body.
An even stranger thing I observed was of a woman on an internet chat forum who had recently lost her husband.
Despite the support and urgings of other members of the form to seek help she committed suicide due to depression caused by the loss.
As a mark of respect the forum hosts kept the thread in memory of her and would annually open the thread up so people who wanted to could post their respects.
A most amazing thing happened when they first opened the thread up for this - a man who had never met the lady or written to her when she was alive came onto the thread and began attacking her; telling her how he hated her for the things she had done to her family; how selfish she was and how he could never forgive her and how could she live with herself? The fact she was not actually alive any more seemed to have gone past his awareness.
He then (quite rightly in my opinion as he hurt the nature of the thread) experienced some social rejection himself.
I wonder if the impalas react this way to each other when one of their number goes into the Immobilisation Response? These are just one of many examples I have seen that demonstrate how people already suffering from the pain of different forms of social rejection have the problem compounded by further rejection - but the important thing here is that we have absorbed this attitude in regard to our own inner world.
We reject our own natural pain-relieving process and try to fight our way out of it.
If we could just learn to go with the response and understand this is how we are biologically made - and know we would eventually come through the other side and be OK - then if the suicide option came up we could just ignore it.
It may be for these reasons - our lack of understanding of the emotional process alongside the socially-maintained belief we should not accept the temporary helplessness state of the Immobilisation Response, and the fear of further social rejection, that we find ourselves fighting traumatic buried emotional energies, sometimes even decades after a suicide attempt.
How to Remove the Suicide Command The impala goes fully into the Immobilisation Response and then when it sees the predator has moved away it naturally comes back into full consciousness, stands up, shakes itself off and carries on as if nothing happened.
It can do this because it accepted the process and knows this is how impalas act in the presence of such a predator.
It knows what its predator looks like.
Our purpose therefore is to go into the traumatised response left in our bodies to firstly identify the nature of our predator and then allow the Immobilisation Response to flow through us.
Our predator could be another person or an impossible situation.
It could even be something such as our own perfectionist attitude.
Whatever our predator looks like, it was eating us alive and we need to acknowledge this and avoid these kinds of predators in the future.
Having the confidence to give in to the process will lead to us being able to stand up at some point, give ourselves a shake and carry on happily.
There are five things I suggest you think about (the Counsellor is a priority but the other elements can be considered at any time) before going into the body to remove any trapped emotional trauma relating to the Suicide Command:
This will demolish the social rejection programming aspects related to your suicide attempt.
With a person-centred counsellor this will become slowly obvious to you.
You will start to find the counselling support remains with you long after they are not physically present.
A cognitive behaviour counsellor/therapist will also do this but will additionally challenge your self-critical thinking as well.
You may want to experiment to decide which type of counsellor you prefer.
You need to stick at it long enough for the experience of self-acceptance to develop.
You may wish to speak to friends and family but they will not do as good a job for you as a professionally trained counsellor.
Counsellors come with no agenda other than the agenda you really want for yourself, but friends and families tend to have their own agendas.
When the counselling process is finished you can fully move away from it, but if you try to do this with friends or family you may find they keep talking about it for years to come when it is not necessary.
Counsellors act as milestone-markers - enabling you to measure your progress, and will challenge you to think in such a way that you come down on your side of things.
They teach you to be your own best friend - which is not what our society teaches you to be.
The affects of having habitual unconditional acceptance from another person of this nature will lead you to develop and believe in your own inner counsellor.
Becoming More Selfish You have to take care of yourself first before you are able to look after others.
You must accept yourself and spend time relieving your inner pains.
For example if you have become attached to someone who has become your predator and you find yourself going into the withdrawal response due to the fact you feel helpless, you have to acknowledge this is happening and do what is right for you first.
Your body sometimes knows what is going on better than your conscious mind does.
To remove the Suicide Command you will have to hurt for a while.
If, as you go into it, negative self-criticism arises, you need to re-think that criticism and come down on your side by agreeing to give yourself the right to be happy.
Forget about trying to get to the judgemental truths of such things as to who was right and who was wrong.
Make happiness within yourself the compulsory standard and do whatever is needed to achieve it.
You are worth it.
We all are.
Transitioning The impala does not get up until the predator has gone.
Before you go into something as painful as the Suicide Command you too should have a safer environment your unconscious can see is in place, waiting for you to transition to.
This is a backward and forward see-saw process.
When experiencing the Suicide Command and feeling overwhelmed you can just drop a hint to yourself that the new world is safe.
If you try to transition before your new safe environment is in place you will get up only to fall down again when the predator reappears.
You cannot fool yourself into accepting there is no predator present - you must create a new safer environment and transition to it.
The safer this environment is the better - you may have to make some choices your conscious mind dislikes, but if you must, you must.
Do Not Identify With the Suicide Attempt The impala laying on the ground going through the Immobilisation Response does not think I am an Immobilisation Response who is sometimes an impala.
But people often think like that and it acts as a denial tactic and justifies our argument for not experiencing and releasing painful emotions.
I have known people who have argued they should not remove their depression because it drives their poetry writing; a comedian who does not want to remove his manic depression because it fuels his comedy.
This is wrong thinking.
Many people attempt suicide but none of us are suicide attempts who sometimes act like people.
Events like these are meant to be temporary reactions to situations in which we feel helpless - we acknowledge the process then get up and leave.
Let us all be willing to endure the emotional process fully when the predator is present but run free like the impala when it has gone.
PLEASE NOTE: This article does not provide information on the signs of those at risk of attempting suicide and should not be regarded as a replacement for the support of a qualified Doctor, Counsellor or Psychiatrist.
If you, or anyone you know, seems deeply depressed, or has mentioned having suicidal thoughts (and especially if they have previously attempted suicide) a Doctor should be contacted urgently.
If you have recently attempted or are contemplating suicide, or are a witness to an attempted suicide, you should take action to get support and not rely on the hope it will go away by itself.
We all get sad now and again but people in a safe emotional range do not have suicidal impulses.
The conscious and unconscious minds combine to block access to each other to prevent the overall experience re-surfacing.
This is a useful reaction to have in the short term if it protects us long enough for us to transition to a safer environment.
In the long term it can prevent us from getting emotional trauma out of our bodies and the pain that drove the attempt can be in place for years afterwards.
If not accepted and released we can be left in a state of traumatic shock; a sense of wrongness goes on to affect the way we interpret all of our emotional responses from that point on.
This results in emotional blocking.
Over time we may forget the specific details that led to the attempt and stamp a superficial, usually self-critical spin on the experience so we do not have to go into our bodies to re-experience, release and analyse it fully.
It seems far easier to just blame ourselves than to accept the real external issues causing the pain.
The fact is our initial painful responses will be perfectly normal reactions to a painful environment which maybe we needed to deal with or leave, but for whatever reason did not want or know how to.
There is a risk involved in opening up this old wound though because what you are protecting yourself against is what I refer to as The Suicide Command.
This command is a powerful emotional response attached to a buried belief that says something along the lines of I cannot live with this or I cannot live without that.
This belief is so strong and the emotional response so powerful that it creates a delusional bubble that lives inside of us until we go into ourselves and pop it; releasing it for the false delusion it is.
Even years afterwards, when our life is now much happier and we know we should be at peace inside, this mini-horror story can still be threatening to us.
By thinking about the attempt in the right way and getting the support we need we can bring ourselves to a point where we feel safe in fully contacting with the impulses we initially experienced and then simultaneously release both the emotional pain attached and acknowledge and remove the beliefs that created and kept the traumatised response in place.
The work is time consuming and it is painful.
It does not have to be done as a perfect step by step system and should be regarded as a direction to go in.
If you have ever attempted suicide or support someone who has, the following information might help with the releasing process.
I believe attempted suicides are the result of a battle between our conscious minds wanting to have the emotional process work in a way it has been programmed by society to believe it should work, and the way nature has actually designed it to work.
Humans are mammals.
We were mammals before we were humans and this affects the design of our emotional system.
When we have an overwhelming emotional response we are designed to mentally shut down temporarily until the painful experience has passed by.
We are meant to become immobilised when temporarily helpless.
Mammalian Biology - the Immobilisation Response All mammals come with a built-in anaesthetising response known as the Immobilisation Response (also known as the Freezing or Disassociation Response).
This response is commonly seen in prey mammals being attacked by their natural predators and it sits in the middle of the behavioural range known as the fight or flight response.
Mammals who have never played the role of predator have little problem producing this immobilising response - for example an impala being chased by a cheetah may drop to the ground apparently helpless just before the cheetah reaches it.
If you were watching you might wonder why it just did that - you, of course, would continue to run until you could run no more.
Or would you? You might change your mind if you knew:
- the impala does not have a conscious choice - the response is automatic
- the response actually improves the survival chances of the impala because it may appear dead and the cheetah will then reduce the level of attack.
Such apparently dead mammals have been seen to stand up, shake themselves back to awareness and escape when the predator has lost interest for a while - the response greatly reduces the physical pain felt as the animal is being eaten whilst still alive.
For the impala and other prey mammals this natural response is a blessing.
But for us it is a bit more confusing.
We humans do not like to lay down and act helpless.
Confused Humans as Both Prey and Predator Humans have a socially-programmed inner conflict when it comes to the Immobilisation Response because we are both biologically mammalian prey and yet psychologically designed to see ourselves as predators.
Whereas prey animals have learned to adopt only two strategies when their natural predators turn up (flee or freeze) humans have a variety of strategies they can use, including caging the predator or turning the predator into a pet.
We have an ability to re-contextualise a situation by having so many options to choose from.
If I were to ask you to choose whether or not you wish to regard yourself as a prey animal or a predator which would you choose? People have a default socially conditioned setting of wanting to be in control.
As a result we have a reluctance to go through the natural prey-under-attack emotional response cycle and we chastise others who do so because it mirrors what we feel deeply uncomfortable about.
Trauma occurs because we refuse to allow our mammalian biology to do its job.
Intense emotional pain can sometimes mimic the act of being eaten alive and because the unconscious does not know the difference between a real experience and a mental or imagined experience it may initiate the Immobilisation Response when we would rather it did not.
Depression Although not always the case, depression is regarded as the number one pre-requisite for a suicide attempt.
I believe depression is the result of a battle between the need to temporarily withdraw from a situation to allow the Immobilisation Response to clear the emotional system and the conscious thinking mind refusing to accept the process.
Studies of brain activity during depression show activity in the conscious brains (the two hemispheres that plan our way forward in the outer world) is greatly reduced.
We lose awareness of the outside world.
The state of consciousness changes and overall activity pulls back into the more primitive Mammalian Brain.
This leads to an experiencing of greater intensity of emotional ruminations which are present in our lower more primitive brains.
What this allows for, though, is the release of emotional pain.
But now our conscious minds, full of social programming telling us how we should always be happy, tries pulling us back from the process by consciously dragging ourselves out of it.
We become manic in our effort to become happier and attempt to reverse the process we do not want to go through.
We hate the idea that nature owns us.
Our egos are convinced nature cannot be trusted to do the job for us - we need to win.
There are four aspects to depression:
- a life event triggers a painful emotional response and our conscious minds withdraw causing us to become inward-looking and unable to see alternative external options (asking us to operate otherwise is no different to asking someone to do algebra while you stab the back of their hand with a pin - and remember the mind does not know the difference between emotional and physical pain) - up until this point we are following the natural emotional repair process but then ...
- we say hold on a minute, I need to pull myself together, I need to take back control - now we start fighting both our naturally driven mammalian response to helplessness and we keep trying to change unchangeable external circumstances that led to that response
- when we find we cannot change the external circumstances it leads to a sense of intense entrapment - the emotionally-driven urge to escape becomes so strong we just want to stop the whole thing and the option of suicide then presents itself as a means of escape.
Unfortunately we are not socially trained to manage ourselves in this way and risk social rejection even if we do.
Socially Rejecting Environments Social acceptance is one of the most powerful needs people have (and I am sure most other mammals would regard it as important too) and it could be argued that all human pleasure responses are, at some point, linked in to the need for social acceptance.
Most of our lives are governed by the meanings involved in our relationships with others.
We are just made that way.
Conversely, social rejection (and the loss of someone close due to death is similar to such a rejection) can be extremely painful.
At a biological level we believe our very survival depends on social acceptance.
I have spoken to a lot of people suffering with depression, including several who have made suicide attempts, and in all cases the fear and sometimes the reality of social rejection, particularly by those we feel we should be closest to but are not, has been the underlying cause of their emotional problems.
The pain can be overwhelming when others are using the threat of social rejection as a power and punishment tactic to control our lives.
Ironically the response people often receive when they eventually make a suicide attempt due to the pain caused by social rejection is further social rejection.
We even start rejecting ourselves.
Two Case Studies I know a man who attempted suicide after his wife ended their relationship no fewer than six times just prior to their first child being born.
They had planned to have a child together for some time but as soon as she became pregnant she told him the relationship was over and she had regarded him only as a sperm provider.
He wanted to be a father and could not stand the idea of losing contact with the child and kept going back to the wife who kept rejecting him.
After several months of this he took an overdose of insulin tablets and was rushed to hospital.
Later when he was put in a bed on the ward the ward doctor told him off because the pills he had taken could not have killed him but they could have left him in a vegetative state.
The doctor went on to describe the kinds of drugs and dosages the man should take in order to kill himself so that next time he could succeed without burdening the state with having to look after his comatose body.
An even stranger thing I observed was of a woman on an internet chat forum who had recently lost her husband.
Despite the support and urgings of other members of the form to seek help she committed suicide due to depression caused by the loss.
As a mark of respect the forum hosts kept the thread in memory of her and would annually open the thread up so people who wanted to could post their respects.
A most amazing thing happened when they first opened the thread up for this - a man who had never met the lady or written to her when she was alive came onto the thread and began attacking her; telling her how he hated her for the things she had done to her family; how selfish she was and how he could never forgive her and how could she live with herself? The fact she was not actually alive any more seemed to have gone past his awareness.
He then (quite rightly in my opinion as he hurt the nature of the thread) experienced some social rejection himself.
I wonder if the impalas react this way to each other when one of their number goes into the Immobilisation Response? These are just one of many examples I have seen that demonstrate how people already suffering from the pain of different forms of social rejection have the problem compounded by further rejection - but the important thing here is that we have absorbed this attitude in regard to our own inner world.
We reject our own natural pain-relieving process and try to fight our way out of it.
If we could just learn to go with the response and understand this is how we are biologically made - and know we would eventually come through the other side and be OK - then if the suicide option came up we could just ignore it.
It may be for these reasons - our lack of understanding of the emotional process alongside the socially-maintained belief we should not accept the temporary helplessness state of the Immobilisation Response, and the fear of further social rejection, that we find ourselves fighting traumatic buried emotional energies, sometimes even decades after a suicide attempt.
How to Remove the Suicide Command The impala goes fully into the Immobilisation Response and then when it sees the predator has moved away it naturally comes back into full consciousness, stands up, shakes itself off and carries on as if nothing happened.
It can do this because it accepted the process and knows this is how impalas act in the presence of such a predator.
It knows what its predator looks like.
Our purpose therefore is to go into the traumatised response left in our bodies to firstly identify the nature of our predator and then allow the Immobilisation Response to flow through us.
Our predator could be another person or an impossible situation.
It could even be something such as our own perfectionist attitude.
Whatever our predator looks like, it was eating us alive and we need to acknowledge this and avoid these kinds of predators in the future.
Having the confidence to give in to the process will lead to us being able to stand up at some point, give ourselves a shake and carry on happily.
There are five things I suggest you think about (the Counsellor is a priority but the other elements can be considered at any time) before going into the body to remove any trapped emotional trauma relating to the Suicide Command:
- A counsellor
- Become more selfish
- Transitioning
- Do not identify with the suicide attempt.
This will demolish the social rejection programming aspects related to your suicide attempt.
With a person-centred counsellor this will become slowly obvious to you.
You will start to find the counselling support remains with you long after they are not physically present.
A cognitive behaviour counsellor/therapist will also do this but will additionally challenge your self-critical thinking as well.
You may want to experiment to decide which type of counsellor you prefer.
You need to stick at it long enough for the experience of self-acceptance to develop.
You may wish to speak to friends and family but they will not do as good a job for you as a professionally trained counsellor.
Counsellors come with no agenda other than the agenda you really want for yourself, but friends and families tend to have their own agendas.
When the counselling process is finished you can fully move away from it, but if you try to do this with friends or family you may find they keep talking about it for years to come when it is not necessary.
Counsellors act as milestone-markers - enabling you to measure your progress, and will challenge you to think in such a way that you come down on your side of things.
They teach you to be your own best friend - which is not what our society teaches you to be.
The affects of having habitual unconditional acceptance from another person of this nature will lead you to develop and believe in your own inner counsellor.
Becoming More Selfish You have to take care of yourself first before you are able to look after others.
You must accept yourself and spend time relieving your inner pains.
For example if you have become attached to someone who has become your predator and you find yourself going into the withdrawal response due to the fact you feel helpless, you have to acknowledge this is happening and do what is right for you first.
Your body sometimes knows what is going on better than your conscious mind does.
To remove the Suicide Command you will have to hurt for a while.
If, as you go into it, negative self-criticism arises, you need to re-think that criticism and come down on your side by agreeing to give yourself the right to be happy.
Forget about trying to get to the judgemental truths of such things as to who was right and who was wrong.
Make happiness within yourself the compulsory standard and do whatever is needed to achieve it.
You are worth it.
We all are.
Transitioning The impala does not get up until the predator has gone.
Before you go into something as painful as the Suicide Command you too should have a safer environment your unconscious can see is in place, waiting for you to transition to.
This is a backward and forward see-saw process.
When experiencing the Suicide Command and feeling overwhelmed you can just drop a hint to yourself that the new world is safe.
If you try to transition before your new safe environment is in place you will get up only to fall down again when the predator reappears.
You cannot fool yourself into accepting there is no predator present - you must create a new safer environment and transition to it.
The safer this environment is the better - you may have to make some choices your conscious mind dislikes, but if you must, you must.
Do Not Identify With the Suicide Attempt The impala laying on the ground going through the Immobilisation Response does not think I am an Immobilisation Response who is sometimes an impala.
But people often think like that and it acts as a denial tactic and justifies our argument for not experiencing and releasing painful emotions.
I have known people who have argued they should not remove their depression because it drives their poetry writing; a comedian who does not want to remove his manic depression because it fuels his comedy.
This is wrong thinking.
Many people attempt suicide but none of us are suicide attempts who sometimes act like people.
Events like these are meant to be temporary reactions to situations in which we feel helpless - we acknowledge the process then get up and leave.
Let us all be willing to endure the emotional process fully when the predator is present but run free like the impala when it has gone.
PLEASE NOTE: This article does not provide information on the signs of those at risk of attempting suicide and should not be regarded as a replacement for the support of a qualified Doctor, Counsellor or Psychiatrist.
If you, or anyone you know, seems deeply depressed, or has mentioned having suicidal thoughts (and especially if they have previously attempted suicide) a Doctor should be contacted urgently.
If you have recently attempted or are contemplating suicide, or are a witness to an attempted suicide, you should take action to get support and not rely on the hope it will go away by itself.
We all get sad now and again but people in a safe emotional range do not have suicidal impulses.