Are you suicidal?

Survive the crisis. Suicide is forever. Feeling suicidal is generally temporary or intermittent. The first step is to delay acting on the desire to harm yourself at the peak of your feelings of despair. This is the time you are most apt to harm yourself, but it is also the time you are least able to make a fair minded decision.

If life has not been fair to you, you owe it to yourself to be fair to yourself and wait until your emotions subside so you can think more clearly.

Make a commitment to yourself: I will never make a major life altering decision when I am at an emotional extreme.

Make your environment safe. If you possess substantial quantities of medication, consult your doctor about maintaining the necessary medications and their dosage, and discard the rest. If you have alcohol or other psychoactive drugs lying around the house, get rid of them. Suicide is too easy with pills and alcohol is available.

Make use of the people around you. People caught up in their pain feel an incredible sense of aloneness. They believe that nobody understands or cares. People who feel alone in this world almost always overlook people who do care for them and who would try and help if given the opportunity. Whither it is a family member, next door neighbour who you know or a worker at LifeLink.

The bottom line is that if you are on the verge of suicide, you need to remember that there is someone out there who wants to know and who will be eager to help if you allow it.

Take time to care for yourself. When you are feeling upset or depressed this is easier said than done. But because you are available to yourself at any time, you are potentially your own most valuable resource. Do little things like taking better care of yourself. Even if that's going to bed and getting up at reasonabl hours, having a shower and getting nicely dressed. These little things can create a positive chain reaction in your life.

This may not dramatically change your life but they will break the vicious cycle of harmful self care habits that can make you feel even worse. It will set a new tone and help alleviate the distress at least temporarily and help sustain you through this period.

As hard as it may be to believe: you can change how you feel. Let's end with a simple but profound principle: A thought is not a fact. As hopeless as a situation appears, or as bad as you feel within yourself there is support available and there are people who are willing to help.

Remember: Suicide is NEVER the answer