In the usual clinical encounters between a health professional and a suicidal patient the clinician interviews the patient in the search for clinical risk factors, particularly for signs of a psychiatric disorder, such as depression, substance abuse, severe personality disorder or schizophrenia. The patient however, is caught in an internal struggle with an unbearable self, unbearable mental pain, extreme hopelessness, and self-hate. The suicidal patient does not feel that suicide plans need medical treatment.

 

Thus, the patients’ concepts of suicide and the concepts of professional helpers, do not match, i.e., patients and doctors speak different languages. The Tower of Babel Syndrome.

 

Suicide is not a symptom of psychiatric disorder, but an action. Most health professionals have not learned how to understand peoples’ actions. Even in a severe depression, it is not the disorder itself, which initiates the suicidal act, but the individual, the “owner” of the depression.