Every show with a suicide now has a disclaimer with a suicide hotline at the beginning. Is there any evidence that these warnings make a positive difference?

I struggle with suicidal ideation problems. They have been so severe in the past that I almost went through it. While not all suicidal scenes trigger me, there are a few. And I have found that having the warnings help me from shutting off the TV and running off in a crying fit. I know it's coming and can prepare myself. And knowing that the hotline is there has been one of the most comforting things I know of. I may have never called, but it's there for when I can't deal on my own. So yes, the warnings make a positive difference for me.

The national suicide prevention hotline is almost always too busy and callers often need to wait on hold. They've calibrated everything from the hold music, the script, and the recorded voice to keep callers on the line.

This factoid splits people pretty evenly between those who find it horrifying and those who find it hilarious.

I should say that according to the hotline, the changes made to the hold system has resulted in 100,000 fewer hang-ups per year.

I think, at best, it can only help with certain types of potential suicides. Some suicides occur due to apparently hopeless life situations. For instance, I haven't been able to get a real job in 23 years despite, in that time, finishing a B.A., an M.A., and a Ph.D. Nothing that everybody says to do works for me and I'm frankly tired of hearing it. I'm stuck DoorDashing (Uber was way too abusive) and that I'm stuck doing that is intensely depressing.

Psychology can't help with this. The only thing that can help is a real job. And that's what a lot of the babble about suicide prevention seems to miss.

Suicides can be really easy to prevent.

Like, the hotline itself is incredibly effective, and reminding people it exists would naturally help.

People aren't getting the number from the intro, but it reminds them it exists.

It makes a very positive difference, according to their lawyers.

Good question, but I expect as far as whether it should be there or not, it doesn't really matter. There is no harm in it being there, after all. And in the end, if it helps one single person not kill themself, I'd say that's a win.

No idea, but I thought this would be a good time to share that teen suicide attempt rates spiked almost 30% in the month following Netflix's 13 Reasons Why. It's a pretty bad show, so of course it got 4 seasons.

Idk, but I bet they think it's the least they can try. If it saves just one life, it has been worth.

Based on what I've heard about the US's 988, it may rather be negative.

Oh, you're thinking of killing yourself, let us reinforce that by being absolutely rude, or better yet, time to get taken away by cops into a psych ward.

Let's see what's out there with some example (Reddit)
Summary: Person called 988, police showed up 90 minutes later, got taken for mandatory psychological evaluation, forced to stay 2 days in ER, ended up getting billed $6,470.

I remember my college had a suicide awareness day where among other things they told people to tell their suicidal friends to call the hotline if they felt suicidal.

Now imagine you are that person and you reach out to a friend for help only to have them tell you to call someone else in a canned speech you were told to tell others.

All the lukewarm attempts to help, rooted in shallow understanding, reinforced my suicidal ideation. What's the value of false love from a paid hotline worker one will never speak to again? It's negative.

Be ready to love the shit out of someone yourself. Share their sorrow. Don't try to fix it. Just try to understand. It'll fucking suck. The other person knows it sucks for you. Tell them it sucks and that you're choosing it.

Legend is the first suicide hotline was created after a girl killed herself because she had her first period.

People kill themselves for lots of reasons, but some of those reasons are just ignorance. I feel certain any suicide hotline could have helped her out if she'd called one.

I don't think it's about making a positive difference, it's about liability.

Definitely better than the YouTube approach and just make people call it suiclide, so no one really knows that they can kill themselves

There’s evidence that trigger warnings actually worsen anxiety and are counterproductive

The way to treat anxiety is to face the source of anxiety to try and change your relationship and reaction. The best way to do this is via controlled access that exposes one to the trigger gradually in a context that has no risk of harm (eg a media depiction, discussing the concept, building up to discussing the source of trauma that led to the phobic response if applicable)

Trigger warnings enable active avoidance. This sensitizes one to the aversive stimuli and makes the phobic response stronger. As a result when one encounters the stimulus (eg a friend, family, celebrity etc commits suicide, suffers an eating disorder, etc) your resilience to the trigger is now even lower and the response is more likely to be more significant than it was before.

That said education on access to resources like 988 or other warm lines can lower suicide rates, maybe. Research is more mixed here because it’s difficult to prove causation

Need to test by providing a tag at the start of these episodes that provides instructions how to kill yourself

Optics.

Sooner or later someone will commit suicide while watching your show, no matter what you do. If that episode happens to contain a suicide scene, and somebody rightly or wrongly connects the dots, you want the disclaimer to be there.

I would like to think that these hotlines are helpful.

I have experience with somebody calling a sexual abuse hotline and being told to " Work less and go outside tomorrow".

This was a crisis situation and the advice was woefully inadequate and unhelpful.

Overall, I'm sure access to a hotline that is monitored with people who are experts at dealing with these situations is a good thing. I doubt they're funded very well though.

I've lost too many people in my life to suicide, and it's a really hard topic for me to watch on screen.

So even though I've got no use for a hotline, just knowing that the show will center suicide as a theme is important to me being able to decide if/when to watch it.

I wish I could opt out of those messages. On streaming platforms that should be doable! (I really hate spoilers.)

I can't imagine they'd be helpful to me, if anything it makes me feel lesser or condescended to. It's not the right way to talk about suicide with people who are suicidal.

No, but like airport security, the point is to look like it's effective.

To my knowledge, there hasn't been a major peer reviewed study to show whether these warnings make any difference.

Now, my own anecdotal non-peer reviewed personal opinion would be that they probably make no difference at all. Businesses likely began adding them only to waive potential liability and not to actually do anything helpful. They can be frustrating because they spoil upcoming events in media that may have been unexpected or unknown, but because of the warning are now definitely known and thus feels "ruined" when it happens. They can also reinforce ideation of suicide because a person may feel like the ones that added the warning did it as a token thing, treating the person like they are a badge of honor or some kind of selling point. Whether that is true or not doesn't really matter, a person that is suicidal is almost never "in their right mind," and if they feel that way, they feel that way. Nobody can tell them how to feel, not even themselves sometimes.

I predicted in about 10 years disclaimers at the beginning will include, 'This show depicts murder. Neither the show's creators producers or actors condone the taking of another human life.'

It's funny I litterally just finished an episode of Search Engine, the 'new' PJ Vogt podcast, where that's the actual question. It was the May 3rd episode, and they're interviewing a researcher on the topic, etc.

My comment is meant to bring the perspective of someone who's facing depression so to try to answer the main question ("a warning with suicide hotline really make positive difference?") through that perspective. It's not to seek mental help for myself.

For context, I'm a person facing depression, and my depression has broad and multifaceted reasons, from unemployment, going through familiar miscommunication (my parents can't really understand my way of thinking), all the way to my awareness of climate change and transcendental concepts that lead myself to existential crisis. I'm unemployed to seek therapy (it's a paid thing) and I don't really have someone face-to-face capable of understand the multitude of concepts and ideas that I face in my mind (even myself can't understand me sometimes).

That said, every depressive person has different ways to cope with depression. While some really need someone to talk to (and the talking really helps in those situations), it's naive to think a conversation will suffice for every single case. I mean, no suicide hotline will make me employed, nor will magically solve the climate changes we're facing.

So how I try to deal with my own depression? With two things: occult spirituality (worshiping The Dark Mother Goddess) and writing poetry and prose. I use creative writing as "catharsis" for my suffering, in order to "cope" with the state of things that I can't really control (I can't "employ myself" or "sell my services to myself", I can't "befriend myself", I can't stop temperatures from rising till scorching temps, nor the other already-ongoing consequences of climate change; I try to make some difference but I'm just a hermit weirdo nerdy nobody among 8 billion people, and I have no choice but to accept it).

I'm no professional writer (I'm just a software developer), but thanks to The Goddess, I can kinda access my unconscious (dark) mind and let it speak freely (it's called stream-of-consciousness writing style). Sometimes I even write some funny surrealist prose/story, but sometimes it takes a darker turn, such as dark humor, or nihilistic, or memento mori. Doing this relieves the internal pressure inside my unconscious mind. After writing, I sometimes decide to publish it through fediverse , but when I do it, I constantly feel the need to "self-censor": sometimes the stream-of-consciousness can lead to texts that people could interpret as some "glorification of suicide/self-harming" (especially when my texts take a nihilistic/memento mori turn), so I often censor myself and change the way I wrote the text. Well, it's kinda frustrating not being able to fully express it, but I kinda understand how these texts could trigger other people also facing depression.

The fact is: when I write, it's really relieving, way more than talking to people because, with poetry/prose writing, I can express symbolic things, I can have multiple layers of depth, I can use creative literary devices such as acrostics and rhymes, I can learn new English words while being a Brazilian, I can blend scientific concepts with esoteric and philosophic (my mind really thinks this way, blending STEM, philosophy and belief/esoteric/occult/religious concepts) without the need to fully explain them (because it'd take several hours and it'd be boring to anybody else other than me).

So, in summary (TL;DR): it depends on how multifaceted is the depressive situation. It won't work for me. It surely can work for others that just need to talk to someone. Not exactly my case.

It’s really about not being sued by someone’s family for claiming that they got the idea from the show.

I would never call one.

When I was suicidal the thing that helped me most was lostallhope dot com.

"55% success chance, 15 minutes and 80-something agony for something as drastic as slicing one's neck? Fucking hell there's no getting away from it is there. " - I thought.

Think it got taken down a long time ago, last I checked it didn't load anyway, prolly cuz of the shady shit happening on SS

These helplines ain't shit, I'm not even suicidal and it makes me want to an hero seeing that patronising cringe shit. There better be some solid proof it works on the masses, I can't imagine how much actual mental health service funding in the UK could've been done from the budget of all that social advertising.