@ReAdSaLoT Said
This is where professional intervention needs to come in. As hard as it is, you have to give them a hot line number ...
Call an ambulance, never try to handle them on your own. As I said in my post, people who need this much attention, are seriously, mentally ill.
Sorry, I can't help my argumentative side, and this actually ties back even more directly the title of the thread, and it is most
definately something people should keep in the back of their minds should they actually be faced with having to convince somebody of this nature to get help.
So, respectfully, I must slightly disagree with some points here, at least in the reguard as this being blanket advice applicable to all situations.
As a psychologist, I'm sure you know how complicated it can be to address the subject of getting serious help to someone who is deeply disturbed and is also adamently against the whole idea of getting professional help. Why, to send an ambulance and sirens directly to their door has an
incredibly high risk of triggering an impulsive and dangerous reaction; even should the approach be without the lights and sirens they will have to announce their presence at some point, a point that could prove to be impulsively fatal to the person. To even
broach the subject of getting real help carries a high risk of backfiring and has to be handled incredibly delicately. When dealing with such people, you cannot simply hand them a phone number and expect anything to come of it, and sending sirens to their door could very easily equal them being dead before those professionals even have the chance to knock, let alone help.
When dealing with emotionally disturbed people who have a deep adversion to professional help, it's much more complicated than any of that, and to handle it so bluntly has a very high liklihood of backfiring terribly, and possibly irreversibly. You can most definitely hand them a phone number and bow out of the situation, and you may have to at some point to save your own sanity, but the odds of the phone number even being considered are low at best and really ammount to nothing more than one ditch effort for them. (I do agree that a person shouldn't feel guilty about having to step out though. There are situations that are simply out of people's hands no matter how hard they tried, though that in itself will likely do little to stop the guilt that comes with leaving someone you care about to their fate.)
Admittedly, this is not something I fully understood at the time, not until years later actually, but I had talked to this particular girl enough that even then I understood that such an approach would do nothing but harm, especially in a system that couldn't hold her to therapy for more than three useless days.