Posted: 2026-02-21

Preface

This essay contains a particularly strong and personal discussion of suicide. Some people see the word and turn their brains off. I need you not to.

The public narrative is constructed in such a way that anyone who speaks on this topic is considered to be "in crisis". I am not. And if you're thinking it, you just fell for that narrative.

Intervention As The Origin Of Risk

The risk assessment process of law enforcement and coercive psychiatric frameworks is inherently structurally oblivious to iatrogenic risks, despite the extreme prevalence of intervention processes creating risks that didn't exist beforehand.

Any large system which admits its own actions caused the exact catastrophic problem it was created to avoid will face a legitimacy crisis. So it needs to invent a new narrative where something else happened, and that narrative must diverge from material reality for the people victimised — but maintain apparent credibility with the general public.

The nature of coercive systems is that resisting the false narrative being forced on the person is universally taken as a reason to escalate further and restrict more aggressively; interpretive non-compliance is placed into the highest category of risk, not because it necessarily proves there is risk of harm to people, but because it threatens the coercive structure itself.

These systems do not merely assess risk based on behaviour. They do it based on alignment to their self-interested stories.

I have not had a major psychiatric episode in 20 years, but for over a decade I have personally kept a loaded Ramset with the safety defeated, specifically for the day that some fuckwit calls a welfare check on me. I can make a hard guarantee that any attempt to hospitalise will result in my brains being blown out instead; I'll be dead before they reach the front door. My self-defense would harm nobody but myself.

The default institutional response to this will be "we need to control who can buy Ramsets!" (cowardly, politically clean, solves nothing) instead of "hey maybe we should stop giving him something to defend himself from" (complicated, means admitting fault, might actually improve the situation).

Attempting to "resolve" the risk by removing the tools people use to defend themselves from it means they don't have to ask why the fuck they need to defend themselves in the first place, and even scarier, how death became a favourable outcome to intervention.

Some would call naming this situation "offensive", which once again delegitimises a narrative that does not align with the institutional one.

This is the result of a rational actor resolving the risks and uncertainties created by the system, and taking the only option which doesn't include accepting the institution's authority in defining their internal state.

One friend who had spent time in wards described this stance as "Cooked. Also rational. Maybe too rational."

I have profound agoraphobia and being placed into an environment which is inherently destabilising (which I cannot leave until I magically stabilise) cannot happen. I have already received the treatments they would provide in these environments and that's what made my agoraphobia profound. There is no conceivable therapeutic benefit to being in one of these places which justifies the profound and guaranteed deterioration. In particular, benzos do not reduce panic for me. They cause executive dysfunction and disinhibition for no gain.

Usually when people hear suicidal intentions, they interpret them as crises, breakdowns, episodes and so on. "I have done the calculus. I know what I'm in for, and have rationally concluded that the only acceptable option is the only possible one which guarantees I avoid your intervention" is deeply problematic for an institution which claims benevolence. If there was a less dramatic option I would take it, but this is the only one which allows for a hard guarantee of outcomes regardless of institutional judgement and opinions.

Welfare checks in particular are done by police, who have no medical training when deciding whether someone is "okay". Them understanding the above nuance is extremely unlikely.

If you think suicide is dark, consider what being forced into an environment which will endlessly make you unthinkably worse then told you can only leave when you get better is like. Then think carefully about what "hospital" means to some people. There are different shades of dark. For some people, "suicide is always wrong and always the darkest concept" is a fixed, immutable belief which will not budge with evidence. There's a term in psychiatry for beliefs like that.

I am not the only person who lives under this set of constraints, just one of few who is willing to take the risk of being open about it. What I have just described is a system failure mode, not just my own experience. Understanding the behaviour of people who rationally and actively respond to the system's behaviour is critical to system design.

Patients get boundaries too, and mistaking them for "distress" or "illness", or infantilising someone for expressing them, has consequences. Some people will place your consequences back on you. Psychiatrists do not currently get dragged through the coals for over-intervening.

Calling for earlier and stricter interventions in the wake of high-profile events must be carefully considered. Have humility in interventions. Know what you are creating.

🔗 Checkin

Version: 1

Written: 2026-02-21

Written on: 7.5mg olanzapine since 2025-11-11 (been on it continuously on one dose or another since 2006)

Mental health was: very poor - estimate 15% brain

General reminder: percentage is total information processing capacity and not reflective of "distress". The contents of this essay are positions I've held continuously for over a decade, and it is not evidence of a deterioration as I'm writing. This whole topic is just kind of old news for me. People like to dismiss topics like this by citing ephemeral mental health problems, which this is absolutely not.

You don't get to dismiss my argument by pathologising me. This is supposed to be uncomfortable. Sanitising this topic with healthcare words doesn't change the reality.

Coercive psychiatry was always a no-win situation (where everything you do is proof) all along. It was just easier to pretend it wasn't, at the expense of the vulnerable. I just deliberately led you into a very similar one, where any conceivable disagreement proves my point, demonstrating the trap by recreating it while being entirely honest. This is what coercive psychiatry does. If it feels unfair when every possible response to something painful is shown to be proof of someone else's framing, imagine living it full time. The Ramset is real.