Comment by strken
5 hours ago
I have the impression you could be confusing suicidality with the little voice that says "what if I stuck my finger in the candle wax?" or "what if I forgot to put on clothes before going to work?" and only mentions tall buildings once or twice a year.
I'm pretty sure the latter is really common. I've always thought it was my brain generating failure cases for risk assessment. We think "What if I dropped this bottle of water on my lap while driving and crashed?" and then we take more care not to drop it.
Yes, intrusive thoughts are common, and are fairly independent from actual self-destructiveness. You can have intrusive thoughts without being especially self-destructive, and you can be self-destructive without thinking much.
GP mentions concurrent extreme stress and multiple variations of suicidal ideation, along with a prediction of the relief that would bring. Also, that the thoughts stopped once the stress did.
Not sure how they could describe suicidality more clearly. Speaking as someone who has also experienced it due to chronic health conditions that had gotten particularly bad for a while.
Yes, and I'm saying that is clearly suicidality, but I think TFA is talking about something else.
These are called intrusive thoughts. I have learned about these through a family member with ADHD. With ADHD, you can have the dual problem of both the wandering, intrusive thoughts, with sometimes the lack of impulse control. It can be really dangerous for some.
What the poster is talking about is different, something that occurs in a deep depression where your mind is struggling to find a way out of the situation. Sometimes the will gives out completely and you're just a zombie to the world, only slogging forward out of habit and maybe guilt.
There's another term for the certain-death variety which I prefer - the "call of the void". I think that captures it nicely.
I know that the poster is talking about something that occurs in deep depression, but I don't think Edgar Allan Poe was and I don't think TFA was either.