People who think about suicide in an extremely short period of time are way more prone to attempt than people who consider it for months or years, and we don't talk about this enough.
We are pretty good preventing quick, impulsive suicidal ideation, most of the time they fail a get proper help to overcome it, but we absolutely suck when trying to prevent chronic suicidal ideation.
This is a problem I see in suicide prevention campaigns and when people says "most people who attempt suicide regrets it!"
There's something that they don't know, and it's that most people who attempt suicide thought about it for like 10 minutes max.
Not kidding, an actual Harvard study found out that most suicide attempts were extremely impulsive reactions caused by discomforting events that happened minutes before the action, very few failed suicides were made by people who thought about it for days or months, let alone years.
So, the interesting thing is that suicide is an action that requires a lot of will and emotion to make, you're fighting your most primitive instincts which means that you must have an strong urge and determination to make that act, usually caused by external events, similar to how some animals kill their offspring in situations of stress.
This means that an usually happy person who went through a traumatizing event moments ago fits the common requirements for suicide than a person who slowly suffered events that put them in that position over time.
Obviously, this doesn't mean that chronic suicidal people will never attempt suicide, in fact, they have a higher chance of success.
In the same Harvard study, they found out that most survivors of self-inflicted gunshot wounds did not suffer from major depression of psychosis and 60% experienced an interpersonal conflict during the 24 hours preceding their attempt.
This seems crazy, right? How are non depressed individuals more likely to kill themselves than depressed individuals! But that's the thing: they aren't.
Suicide is a spectrum and it brings mixed emotions and complex feelings, there's something called "cry of help" attempts where a person tries non lethal methods because a part of them wants to survive and be found in order to be taken seriously and get help, that's why they usually fail and regret it.
A person who thought about suicide for a long, long time is different though, they usually try severe and lethal methods because the part of them that wants to get better doesn't exist, chronic depression can mitigate your survival instincts and makes you feel like there's no actual hope, it's way harder to deal with that as a third party than with immediate thoughts.
This is why our approach with suicide should be different depending on the individual, someone who is about to kill themselves over a traumatic event from 1 minute ago will probably reconsider when they hear someone say: "don't do it! Think about your family", but a chronically suicidal person won't react the same because they kept that in mind for years.