Suicide and suicidal ideation
PLEASE NOTE THAT WATERFORD COUNSELLING CENTRE IS NOT AN EMERGENCY SERVICE
If you believe that your immediate personal safety is at risk due to suicidal thoughts, intentions, or plans, you should contact your GP as a matter of urgency or present at the Accident & Emergency Department of your local hospital.
Alternatively, you can free phone:
Pieta House Crisis Helpline at 1800 247 247
Or
The Samaritans @ 116 123
If you do not believe your life is in immediate danger, you may feel the need to speak with us about your sense of despair, or disturbing thoughts, or preoccupations.
Suicidal Ideation:
Individuals experiencing suicidal thoughts sometimes feel guilty and ashamed for doing so. They may feel that there are no viable or visible outcomes to the awfulness of their circumstances. Suicide as the so-called permanent solution to temporary problems, can appear as an even more attractive, or inevitable proposition, to escape the solitude of their pain. When a person does indicate either directly or indirectly that they no longer have an interest in living, the QPR model of Paul Quinnett can be employed to question, persuade, and refer in order to normalise the subject matter of suicide.
The first step in saving lives often lies in providing a safe and non-judgemental forum to pose the suicide question. Talking and communication are the basic steps in destigmatising misconceptions around mental health and mental illness, but moreover, someone must actively listen to what this person is saying. Hope, solutions, and alternatives can be offered as gentle persuasion to accept help ideally from a mental health professional, and therapy affords this opportunity.
Working together with a professional therapist in a warm supportive environment can be a gradual means of exploring unseen perspectives, gaining clarity, and eventually expanding and integrating meaningful options into your life.
Support for those bereaved by suicide
People whose lives are devastated when someone they love dies by suicide are often overwhelmed by feelings of shame, guilt, shock, disbelief, and anger. The complexity of their grief is compounded not only by the suddenness of their loss, but also by their inability to make sense of this tragedy, and the eternal absence of answers. They can be burdened with a terrible sense of isolation, believing that nobody will ever comprehend the depth of their hurt.
Some people bereaved in this way become unknowingly ‘stuck’ in the loss and are unable to move on in any real capacity in their lives. It is certainly the truth that therapy cannot bring back the person you have lost, but the work undertaken may enable you to reposition them in some way in your life, as you seek to find a way of making peace with their loss within yourself.
Seeking support is a strength and not a weakness!
“For the meaning of life differs from man to man, from day to day and from hour to hour. What matters, therefore, is not the meaning of life in general but rather the specific meaning of a person’s life at a given moment” (Viktor Frankl).