No Suicide Agreement in Therapy

No suicide contracts are bogus. They are 100% about comfort and liability for the T and guilting or trapping the client into behaving in ways the T is less uncomfortable with.

I refuse to make contracts like that without very specific end dates - so, I would not agree to "while we work together" because that's ambiguous.

I also refuse to make contracts for more than about a week. I see my pdoc weekly too, so I will commit to see her, and then she asks me to commit to seeing T, and so on until things get better. Or T will ask me to commit to calling her on x day to check in.

T wants me to promise to call her if I am going to act on such thoughts. I have promised to try. She's not happy about that, but I view it as the most honest thing I can say.

I do not sign any paperwork. All commitments I make are short term and verbal. Paper contracts are not going to change my commitment to keeping my word, and instead feel diminutive and untrusting. Relationships go 2 ways.

By keeping the commitments to short-term stuff, it stops being about guilt and more about their caring. It clarifies to them how I'm feeling, based on how long I'll agree to go, or how ambivalent I seem about the agreement this time. It allows the feelings to be discussed when relevant - and when these feelings aren't so strong (comes in waves for me), it doesn't have to dominate the discussion.

For what it's worth, as an adult I've never had a therapist balk at my refusal to promise never to kill myself. Even with case managers and nurses in inpatient settings. They want to talk about it, but I've never been refused services due to it - and if I was, they aren't services I would have wanted anyway.