Talking Down the Suicidal

"I wish you would step back from that ledge my friend,
You could cut ties with all the lies, that you've been living in,
And if you do not want to see me again, I would understand."

—Third Eye Blind, "Jumper"

This is when someone is Driven to Suicide and someone else who is aware of their plans decides to actively stop them... by talking them down. Distinct from Interrupted Suicide, but sometimes part of one. If Bob has not gotten the opportunity to interrupt Alice's suicide attempt to request that she not kill herself, maybe she's called him on the phone to say goodbye and he's decided to talk her out of doing the deed rather than go along with her goodbyes. Maybe Bob has told Alice that he plans to kill himself several hours later and Alice, instead of immediately calling 911, is going to take a direct approach towards saving Bob's life. To sum it up, someone has decided, for one or more reasons, that they want to take their own life and someone else has decided to actively confront them and say to them, "Please don't kill yourself."

There are multiple reasons why someone might decide to take this approach instead of immediately calling for emergency help. The most obvious reason for doing this is because of this trope's similar effect to a Care Bear Stare. Even if your life is saved by your being forcefully stopped from killing yourself when you're suicidal, it's nothing like having someone telling you to not do it because they actually care whether you live or die. Also, having only one person or a small group of people (especially if they are close to the person they are doing this to) talk down one person who is about to kill themselves is better for building up emotional tension and drama than having a large emergency team do this. Maybe the Talker wants to spare the Suicidal the embarrassment of having the police come over to do it, or else wants the Suicidal to get help, but wants to minimize the chances of having them being taken off to a mental hospital.

Believe it or not, this is actually one of the best ways to deal with someone who you know to be suicidal. However, you should do the best you can to make it impossible for the person you're dealing with to immediately harm themselves should you actually try this at home. Plus, it's actually best to avoid telling them that they "have so much to live for." You don't have to go all out and plead with them. Just being there for them to talk to, listening to them, and encouraging them to talk to others can make all the difference. If you or someone you know feels this way, there are numbers you can call.

Sometimes it doesn't work, which can make this a Death Trope. As a Death Trope, all Spoilers will be unmarked ahead. Beware.

Examples of Talking Down the Suicidal include:

Anime and Manga

  • Happens in Welcome to The NHK, when Misaki (with others help) convinces an entire suicide club (which Satou joined) to abort their plans.
  • In Natsuneko's manga Rooftop Miracle, two girls independently attempt suicide but end up talking each other out of it.
  • In Katekyo Hitman Reborn in the early chapters of the manga Yamamoto almost commits suicide. This was due to some bad advice that he broke his arm over, and he thought that his career as a baseball player was over. So he moseyed on over to the edge of the school rooftop and prepared to jump, and he was dead serious about it. With an audience of students trying to cajole him out of it, the only voice he listened to was Tsuna's. He ended up falling due to bad construction of a gate but Tsuna saves him. After that, he and Tsuna become good friends and he joins Tsuna's mafia family.
  • Yami no Matsuei: At one point, Tsuzuki tries to commit suicide again thanks to Muraki, and Hisoka hugs him and begs him to not do so.

Comic Books

Comedy

  • Parodied on Improv Everywhere. Police, friends, and a wife all gather to talk down a man . . . off a three-foot ledge.

Film

  • Men in Black. After Edwards (later Agent J) corners the Cephalapoid assassin atop a building, the assassin starts backing up toward the edge. Edwards pleads with him not to, but the Cephalopoid allows himself to fall back and down to his death.
  • Clarence's mission in Its a Wonderful Life is a particularly drawn-out, indirect, and yet extremely direct version of this. In a bid to earn his wings, Clarence is supposed to prevent George Bailey from committing suicide. To do this, Clarence does everything he can to show George what a positive force he has been in the lives of his friends and family members, and yet the closest he comes to straight-out pleading with George to not kill himself is when he says, "You see George, you've really had a wonderful life. Don't you see what a mistake it would be to just throw it away?" after George has already wished himself out of existence.
  • In Titanic Jack convinces Rose not to jump off the titular ship into the icy waters below.
  • Milk shows the eponymous character, Harvey Milk, talking a wheelchair-using gay teenager out of killing himself.
  • Accidental Hero: At the climax John is on a ledge and preparing to jump but Bernie goes out on the ledge and talks him down. Naturally (given the plot of the film) the media think that John talked Bernie down, not the other way around.
  • Meet John Doe: A newspaper reporter writes that a homeless man has told her that he will kill himself at midnight New Year's Day to protest society, then she hires a man to play the part. After their arrangement is exposed by a corrupt businessman worried about the effectiveness of their crusade, he decides to actually do it; she talks him down.
  • Inverted in Canadian Bacon, with John Candy and Rhea Pearlman openly encouraging folks to jump off Niagara Falls to collect a reward on washed-up bodies.
  • The first Lethal Weapon movie does involves this, which turns out to be an inversion. Riggs is spectacularly bad about it. He starts out with the sympathetic angle, smoking a cigarette with the would-be-jumper, then he handcuffs them together, and then Riggs jumps, taking the would-be jumper with him, much to the alarm and dismay of the jumper who cusses him out and calls him crazy after the fact. There was an airbag to break their fall, however, brought in while Riggs was distracting the suicidal person.
  • In Yes Man, the main character sings a man off a ledge with the song "Jumper", quoted above. At one point, he forgets the words, and the suicidal guy fills in for him.

Literature

  • Happens in Moby Dick-Ishmael begs Queequeg not to kill himself after Queequeg sees what he believes is his impending death in the bones he casts. (it was probably really his death with the rest of the crew that he saw, if anything.) The movie has Ishmael going "Queequeg, don't. Queequeg, listen to me. Queequeg, I absolutely forbid you to die."
  • So many stories in the Chicken Soup for the Soul series involve this.

Music

  • The speaker of the song "Jumper" by Third Eye Blind is attempting to talk someone else down from a ledge.
  • The Nickelback song "Lullaby" is all about this, except that the speaker isn't there in person. He's playing the song over the radio, hoping that the suicidal will hear it wherever she is and know that she isn't alone.
  • If one listen to "Move On" by ABBA, it's clear the song takes place from the viewpoint of a suicidal person while the lyrics pleads with him to think it over. This means, the lyrics are explaining that the speaker is having second thoughts about suicides... fitting this trope.

Newspaper Comics

Live-Action TV

  • Lie to Me: In "The Royal We" Cal talks down a girl about to jump off a catwalk.
  • Often turns up in CSI. It's usually the murderer of the week trying to take an easy way out, however one occasion combined this with an odd mix of Suicide by Cop where a suicidal young man, whose failed suicide had led to his girlfriend doing the same, tried to jump off a ledge and tried to get said girlfriend's neighbour (who assumed that he murderered her) to kill him when the cops showed up to talk him down ( the neighbour's talked down, but the guy jumps...into a crash pad the fire department had time to set up while he was distracted).
  • Parodied in an episode of Beavis and Butthead: the title characters encounter a suicidal man who is considering jumping from a roof. When they argue in favor of suicide, the man misinterprets their arguement as assurance that he is not alone in his depression.

Butthead: Life sucks, and then you die.

  • In the Torchwood episode "A Day in the Death", an undead Owen Harper manages to talk down a suicidal woman from the ledge, mostly by telling her about his own experience with death.
  • Subverted in Sledge Hammer!, when the eponymous cop deliberately shoots at the feet of the would-be suicide to drive him off
  • Parodied to the extreme in South Park. When Obama wins the 2008 American presidential election, Ike Broflovski, a McCain supporter, is so devastated that he decides to jump out of the first-story window. The four leads, including his older brother Kyle, come outside to talk him out of jumping out the window. He does, and Kyle then takes him to a hospital. The part about Ike being suicidal turns out to be a subversion when viewers see him go into the hospital morgue and declare all of the politicians involved in the jewel heist to be dead, revealing that he was privy to this plan and that he jumped out of the window specifically to put himself in the hospital and enable himself to do this.
  • In an SNL Digital Short we see a man with a bullhorn trying to talk down a "jumper" who - it is revealed - is only a few feet away from him at ground level.
  • The Benny Hill Show: Benny is a passing minister who tries to talk down a jumper, until he finds out that the jumper is a fan of an opposing football team. "Well, flaming well jump then!"
  • In Kyle XY, in the episode Lockdown, Kyle talks Jessi out of jumping.
  • In Buffy the Vampire Slayer, in the episode "I Only Have Eyes For You," Angel talks Buffy out of killing herself, but Angel and Buffy are both not themselves at the time - they are possessed by the ghosts of other people. What makes it weirder is that it happens during the time that Angel is evil.
    • In the episode "Earshot," Buffy talks Jonathan Levinson out of killing himself, although she thinks that she is convincing him not to commit mass murder instead.
    • Buffy also convinces Angel not to kill himself when he is attacked by the First Evil.

Video Games

  • Defender of RON, a game in the Reality-On-The-Norm series, has an optional mission where the protagonist has to try and talk The Grim Reaper out of a suicide attempt.
  • In the "Madd Dogg" mission of Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, gangsta rapper Madd Dogg threatens to jump off the roof of a casino. As the player character you initially attempt to talk him down, to no avail. Assuming you don't get bit by an infamous Game-Breaking Bug at the start of the mission, you need to Take a Third Option to save his life.

Web Comics

Real Life

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