It does not come down to either causing or failing to prevent. She encouraged him, lied about his whereabouts and prevented intervention from reaching him. In essence, it doesn’t matter one bit whether their intervention would have mattered in the end or not. Her intent was for him to succeed in his suicide. Should someone be charged with failing to prevent a suicide? Of course not. That doesn’t make any sense. Should someone be charged with interfering with an intervention that MAY prevent a suicide? I wanna say yes. Just as I think someone should be charged with preventing the intervention of a murder.
The gray area here is whether she should be charged with encouraging his suicide and counseling him to commit suicide. That’s the fuzzy area.
Any normal reasonable person would reach out to try to prevent a friend from hurting themselves. This could and often should mean contacting a parent or family member. Most often someone contemplating suicide needs and/or help. Even if someone tells a friend “in confidence” that they are wanting/trying to kill themselves, the friend should assess to the best of their abilities the severity of the threat and exercise good judgement, which may mean breaking that “confidence” and reaching out for help. They should NOT encourage the person and egg them on. That is reprehensible. My s had a friend who had a history of problems, and at one point the friend called my s who was away at college and told my s he was going to kill himself. My s called me, knowing I was a friend of the kids mother, and shared this information (my s is otherwise extremely private about many things), and I called the kid’s mom. It was the right thing to do. Maybe not always, but most of the time it is the right thing to do. My s’s friend was not angry (as can sometimes happen). He was crying out for help and he got it.
Oops, lost a word or two in the above and its timed out. They usually need and/or are asking for help. Few really really want to die. They just want to stop feeling the way they do.
I’m not a MH professional but I do understand that adolescents have a tendency toward impulsivity and a failure to consider long term consequences. They also have difficulty understanding that bad feelings won’t last forever.
EPTR,
This is emergency services for temporary (at most 3 days) for a mental health evaluation and treatment, in an inpatient facility.
with only 1 exception, I’ve had my teens agree to voluntary hospitalizations, because the private facilities were so much nicer than the county/state facilities. Plus, I had worked at each of the private facilities, so I could help with choosing psychiatrists and therapists. I could also be clear to the teen about expectations.
I’ve stayed with my teens for hours, waited until family members appear, so I bristle at the thought of professionals being cavalier about anyone talking of suicidal ideation and plans.
Her (and his) parents should have monitored all the texts and other communications she (he) had; obviously she didn’t know or care to delete the texts (“If they read my messages I’m done. His family will hate me and I could go to jail.”).
I don’t think she realized that the police would want to inspect the phone of a suicide victim. She clearly didn’t think a lot of this through. I’m curious about the friend that she texted that concern to. The text in which she states that she could go to jail if the police look at her phone. I wonder if that friend knew anything about it as it was going on or if that was just a panic text when she realized she might be in big trouble.