in case it wasn't clear from the title, if hearing about suicide ideation is triggery for you, you might wanna steer well clear. dunno what to do about spoilering, since this whole thread is probably gonna be talking about suicide and suicide-related stuff, but yeah. for now I don't think I'll spoiler and leave this warning up, but if you think spoilering would be a good idea, please let me know. so, context: my brother's fourteen. he doesn't have an autism diagnosis, but I have no idea why the fuck that is, because he is a) very symptomatic, b) attending a school primarily intended for autistic kids who can't handle the public school system, and c) has a doctor who thinks he's autistic. my point with this is that he's not very socially or emotionally mature; he's very smart, but if you talked to him you'd probably think he was ten or eleven, not fourteen. (doesn't help that he hasn't hit puberty yet.) so in this particular situation, it's probably best to think of him as an older kid, not a younger teenager, since that's more or less how he interacts with the world. he has a history of mental illness; I think he first started feeling intensely anxious when he was six or so, complaining that he worried too much to sleep at night. so he got on medication, I think Zoloft, and he's been on some kind of anti-anxiety meds since then. he's still super anxious—at the very least, he voices a lot of worries and has the standard autistic aversions to sensorily overloading places and people—so idk why they aren't fiddling with his meds still, but it seems to be relatively constant. he also had a fairly severe depressive episode when he was nine, which totally passed me by at the time, but my mother noticed and got him to therapy and on meds, etc., so that passed eventually. he also is... I guess I would say emotionally unstable? which is unfair, and probably not a great way to put it, but yeah. his response to overload is meltdown, and he's fairly easily overloaded, and when he's melting down he usually gets violent or tries to run. not violent towards other people, usually, but he'll throw chairs and books around, hit himself, etc., and on a number of occasions he's run out of the school building. aside from this, he also melts down just generally when he gets upset (particularly when he's frustrated), which I'm sure isn't helped by the overload but is definitely not entirely attributable to it. he has a lot of trouble regulating his emotions, basically. anyway, that's him—let's call him J, shall we. and my mother came into my room crying about half an hour ago because he told her he was scared he was going to jump off the deck (which is four stories up) or off the ferry, and she couldn't get him to promise not to hurt himself. he's asleep right now, I think, and she's praying and trying to get into contact with his doctors. problem is, we're about an eight-hour drive from home right now, so there's no immediate medical action we can take. as my mother tells it, and as I understand what's going on in his world right now, this is not at all situational depression. he's at the beach, he's out of summer school, he's not being punished for anything: as far as he's concerned, this is as good as it gets. it's purely a brain chemistry thing. and I would like to do something to help him, but I have no idea what, or even what broad courses of action would be helpful. what I would normally do if someone was suicidal would be to talk to them about what they're distressed about, but in this case there is nothing concrete and discussable. my mother reports that he just says he feels bad and that he sees no point in living. another problem is his relative lack of emotional maturity; he's not good at coherently expressing or discussing emotions, and I don't know if he'd have the attention span to have a conversation with me regarding his emotional state (he also has fairly severe ADHD) or if me pressing him for information would just make him more upset. honestly I'm having difficulty conceptualizing how depression would feel to him; he's not, as far as I can tell, very emotional complex, and I don't know how this all fits into that. he also just may flat-out not be receptive to talking to me; generally speaking he doesn't care about interacting with other people, me included, and it's hard to tell if you're telling him something if he's listening and/or comprehending what you're saying, because he immediately tunes out of things he's not interested in. so yeah, I don't know how to approach him or how to help him. one thought I have had at the moment is that it's a good thing he's scared of committing suicide; it sounds to me like he might be having intrusive suicidal thoughts and is not actually at the point where suicide makes logical sense. I think that's a slightly different problem that should be tackled differently, but again, I don't really know how to go about doing that. also, my mother is extremely upset, and I would like to help her as well, if that's possible. I've already told her my theory about these being intrusive thoughts, but anything else I could tell her that you think might be reassuring would also be appreciated. so if you have experience with suicidal kids or a more personal experience with suicide than I do (I myself haven't been actively suicidal, and I haven't talked to all that many actively suicidal people) or even just any sort of insight or comment that you think could be helpful, please share it. J needs somebody right now, and I don't know how to be that person.
I was suicidal at eleven (though it turns out that even very smart eleven-year-olds produce really ineffective suicide plans.) It's not the exact same situation, but here's some things that helped me: Tell him you love him, and that you'd be sad if he died From time to time, do something nice for him or give him something he likes, especially if it meets a basic need (food, drink, cold on a hot day, stimming) Be present. You don't have to talk to him about his depressed/suicidal feelings (though if he starts the conversation, go for it); talking to him about anything will keep him from being alone in his own head. (Or doing something with him, if he's not talky.) Depression without emotional maturity feels like... hm. Imagine if you lived your whole life in the fog, so you didn't even know about full color and clear air. Everything is limited and dim, and the idea of things not being like that isn't part of your universe. When people talk about emotional experiences that don't fit that model, it's either "sounds fake, but ok" or "well good for you, you get to live in Happiness Universe." Also, this isn't really your job per se, but whatever treatment helped him with depression last time, he should get back on that.
I was also suicidal around eleven, although not particularly actively--I vaguely thought that dying would solve all my problems but I didn't have a plan to go through with it. I can't give specific advice for dealing with a suicidal person who has lower emotional maturity, because I was already fairly emotionally mature at eleven, but I'll give advice based on what I would've appreciated at the time and hopefully something here is helpful. Everything seer suggested would've been helpful to me. Particularly feeling loved, and feeling loved without being judged for what I was going through. This should be fairly obvious, but in conversations about suicidal ideation, don't condemn him for it. My mom told me that thinking about suicide was one of the worst things I could possibly do to my dad, and she made all sorts of threats if I continued to express what I was feeling. Don't do that! The focus of that conversation should be, or at least should've been for me, the love you feel for him and the connection he has to you and your family. If you can help it, try not to let him learn an association between expressing painful thoughts/feelings and punishment/someone else getting really upset. It will likely make him reluctant to be honest with you about this kind of thing again. Another, related suggestion--don't respond super drastically? Unless it seems to be escalating or he seems to be in danger, I think that abruptly changing a lot of things (driving the eight hours back ahead of schedule, or suddenly changing the amount of time you spend with him) might be more distressing to him than it's worth. Of course, again, if you think he's in danger, do what you need to. Hugs for you, your mom, and J if you all want them.
I was like at least mildly suicidal throughout most of my school years (starting probably in grade 3 and peaking in grade 11) and what always helped me was the idea of parallel universes. i read a novel featuring the idea and so, like, if i felt suicidal i would reason with myself that there exists another universe where i have already killed myself at this moment, and so i don't have to do it in this one. which... i have no idea how that might help but it's kind of the only thing that's kept me here, so. it works for me? i didn't get support from others/my parents because i was always super socially isolated and never wanted to expose feelings to the 'rents.
thank you for all the replies, everybody. J's been pretty calm these past couple days, so I'm afraid I've neglected this thread a little, although that has changed recently. I'll get to that shortly, but first I would like to reply to all of you specifically. I haven't hit the first bullet point (mostly because I'm pretty sure his response would be "...okay?"), but the second two are excellent advice, as I discovered during the aforementioned recent developments. thank you! I definitely kept them in mind, and they definitely helped. :( poor smol you and poor smol J, that sounds extremely unfun. and, as I suspected, not much like my fourteen-year-old experience of depression, but still. nasty. wellllll, I think he's still on the meds he started then, but evidently they've stopped working. :/ and we're still on vacation, actually, but there are definitely doctors' appointments scheduled for him once we get back. something (or several somethings) is gonna get done, that's for sure. thank you again for your response! well, erm... for future reference, yes, that is "fairly obvious." like, I would go so far as to say extremely obvious, or even holy-shit-why-did-you-think-you-needed-to-say-that obvious. (what I'm getting at here is that your mom's reaction to your suicide ideation is very unusual and probably not something most people need to be warned against doing.) again, I'm not really sure how to express that I love or even just generally care for him, and I'm also not very sure how he'd react to that sentiment/if he'd care about it, but I wouldn't dream of condemning him for feeling suicidal or trying to threaten him out of it. like, those sound like the most efficient ways to make him feel worse, actually. and I don't think an association between his badfeels and being punished is likely to form, but I will keep in mind your warning about getting upset around him. I know my mom had some trouble keeping it together in front of him, and my grandmother seems to be having some too, so I'll keep that in mind for myself. (generally speaking, even, getting upset when he's upset is a terrible idea, because it just leads to an upset-spiral, which is no fun for anybody.) this is very helpful, and also not necessarily something I would've thought of myself, so thanks! I've got a question, though: today he was saying that if he continued to feel really bad tomorrow, he wanted to go home. (currently we're both at our grandmother's sans mom; him going home would involve our grandmother driving herself, him, and me ~6 hours and three days before she'd originally planned to.) you would say that's a bad idea, then? thanks, and I think we do, yeah. :) sorry you had to go through that, and I hope you're feeling better now. :( I'm also sorry that you felt like you couldn't reach out to the people around you for support. that feeling always sucks. and... you know, that's an interesting brain hack, actually, but it's not something I would think of as being reassuring in the conventional sense, and yeah, I don't think it's terrifically applicable to my brother's situation. :/ I'm glad it worked for you, though. okay, so! a summary of today's developments, as promised. first I hear of anything is sometime in the afternoon, when my grandmother says my brother feels depressed and is missing my dad and wants to be driven home. I'm concerned but don't think poking at him will do much good. later we go out to dinner, and that's when shit really hits the fan. J is visibly apathetic and moping in the car and waiting to be seated, and shortly after we sit down he is overwhelmed (for no particular reason, so far as I can discern) and begins to tear up. this is the point at which he announces that he guesses he'll "just have to be alone with [his] misery," which I'll admit was melodramatic enough to be somewhat amusing, but hey, depression is pretty melodramatic. I ask my grandmother if the restaurant does take-out (it does) and suggest to J that he and I can go sit in the car if he wants to get out of the restaurant. my grandmother asks if we could instead sit inside the restaurant, in the waiting area, and J agrees. I give him my phone to play with (since it has 2048 on it, which I personally find to be an excellent stim) and this occupies him for a while (at one point I coach him through a difficult bit and he makes a successful series of combinations, after which he smiles and then tells me that it was a genuine smile instead of a forced one for once) until he loses the game and gets even more upset. my suggestion for him to try again and my offer to let him watch me play are both rejected, and he begins to raise his voice and hit his head with his fists, which freaks my grandmother out a little bit and prompts her to tell him that he shouldn't yell. he responds that he wants to yell, so I say that he can go yell in the car. my grandmother won't give him the keys but will give them to me, so he and I go sit in the car while our food is prepared. he doesn't actually yell, and when I ask if he wants to talk about how he's feeling he expresses frustration that there's no reason why he's sad, so I tell him that's how my depression was, too, which seems to be an acceptable answer. my grandmother comes out with the food and he's silent on the drive home. once we sit down to dinner my grandmother and I carry on a conversation and he's silent as usual. a little while into dinner, though, he laughs to himself (which is also not unusual) and I ask him what's funny. he says he thought of something funny, and I ask what the thing is, and he quotes and attempts to minimally explain a joke from a Mario Kart YouTube video. I don't get it, really, but I play along, since unlike some of his favorite games I do know some about Mario Kart, and to my surprise he offers to show me the video. I say yes, and he explains a little bit more about the video. the rest of the dinner conversation is him talking about Mario Kart and the gaming internet community generally, with me chiming in occasionally. he's cheered up immensely. after dinner he shows me two 15-minute videos, both entitled "100 ways to fail at Mario Kart 8," which I vaguely enjoyed based on my knowledge of Mario Kart and the video's employment of memes and references with which I'm familiar. I query him on his knowledge of said memes and references and find to my surprise that he knows a lot of them. the Internet's a crazy place. he also apparently spends a lot of his time on Mario Kart YouTube, which is... a thing? apparently? which is kind of hilarious, because he has my parents convinced that he spends all his computer time reading up on sports statistics. I also learned that he watches the videos he showed me "maybe 5 times a week." anyway, after we watched the videos he was super cheerful and thanked me for kissing him on the head, which was cute, so I don't know how bothered he is by the depression currently. input based on this update from you guys would certainly be welcomed, though! but that experience in and of itself was... well, I had no idea we had that frame of reference in common, and that is probably the longest conversation I've had with him, like, ever. or at least in recent memory. he's just not interested in conversing about most things, and you usually just have to keep asking him questions if you want him to talk. but hey, he's certainly up for talking about his special interests! which I was certainly aware of, but most of the references he makes are either to sports, about which I have no knowledge and in which I have no interest, or just completely indecipherable. like, he'll reference something, and I'll ask about it, but usually he doesn't follow up on his explanation like he did tonight. but apparently we have something in common! which is really cool! we'd get along great if our special interests overlapped more—spergs are really easy to befriend, lol—and I hope that that'll happen in future. so yeah, that's the story of how I had a Bonding Moment with my brother over shitty Mario Kart YouTube videos. who knew.
it might be a thing where, like, even when someone is really really depressed, the right kind of cool thing can snap them out of it for a bit. which is probably what happened with the mario kart thing? in my experience those situations feel kinda like a period of almost-euphoria followed by crushing sadness. i would maybe recomend seeing if you have anything else in common? because it sounds like you both had fun with the mario kart thing. like, idk brief happy periods aren't a cure for suicide ideation, but i do think that they help a lot.
Having those good moments sometimes, even if they're surrounded by depression, helps you not forget that things can be better than they feel. Also: *kiss on the head* -> "Thank you for kissing me on the head!" means "I love you." -> "I love you too!" Don't worry about the exact words, the message is getting through.
I... spent basically all of middle school being depressed and somewhat suicidal. What really helped me was having people that I felt like I could talk to about being sad or angry and they would just let me talk and be there for me? I was sent to a counselor for a few months, but I ended up lying to her until I could get out of it because I didn't feel like she was on my side and also being afraid of being put on meds/labeled crazy (and then I asked to get put on meds my last year of undergrad. Go figure). So like the others said, just be there for him, let him know you're listening but not judging him/trying to take someone else's side. Also my cat was a big factor in me not trying to do anything. Because I was really, really connected to Bob and taking care of him was my responsibility and who would take care of him if I was gone? (Parents, obviously, but Bob was my cat and he loved me best!) So... not saying to convince your family you need a pet, but if he has an inclination towards animals, him having something to take care of that is preferably easy to take care of might be helpful.
