Duh: Reasons to Live Help Prevent Suicide During Depression, says new psychiatric research. However, as a psychiatrist treating suicidal patients every day, I largely disagree with the article’s inference that treatment of a suicidally depressed patient be directed toward instilling hope. You can rarely persuade a hopeless patient that they should not be hopeless. If they were susceptible to that kind of reasoning, they wouldn’t be as desperately depressed,would they? And, more important, if you contradict their hopelessness, you’ve usually just made them feel you don’t take their complaints seriously and you’ve blown your alliance with them. One of my mentors once said that treating the suicidal means, first and foremost, paradoxically empathizing with the desireability of death.