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TheOtherDave comments on How would you talk a stranger off the ledge? - Less Wrong
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This worked for me from my mid-teens to some time around my late thirties. What I'm finding now is that depressive episodes much more ideation along the lines of "Nah, it's just too much work, I can't be bothered."
Mostly my response to this was to establish the "other people matter" principle, which implies that if I'm going to kill myself I ought to do so in a way that minimizes the amount of suffering I cause others, which I'm pretty sure means I should make it look like an accident or like natural causes, which takes a fair amount of work. By the time I feel like doing that work, I'm no longer in the mental state where it seems like a good idea.
It might be a mistake to say things like "if I commit suicide, I'll make it look like an accident" in public where your loved ones can hear it, because you could die in an actual accident (which is more likely than suicide) and they would suspect it to be suicide because of what you said.
True. That said, I'm fairly confident this is not such a forum.
I have a medical condition that makes the Bum Comparison Principle untenable (constant care required), but I have to say the Other People Matter Principle has worked pretty well for me so far. At this point, the idea of coming up with and implementing a foolproof minimal-impact suicide plan seems way more annoying and tiring than just going on with my life.
Though, while it worked pretty well in my case, I'm not sure I would recommend "if you kill yourself I'll never forgive myself" as an actual generalized strategy.
Nobody has ever pulled the "I'll never forgive myself" thing on me, but then I don't often have this conversation explicitly with people.
It's more a general sense that there are people who are engaged with my life, who value my presence, who consider what happens to me in some sense their (collective) responsibility, would be hurt by my absence, and doubly hurt if it were self-inflicted.
Admittedly, I had a stroke a few years ago that almost killed me, which made me very aware of how much people care that I'm still alive. I'm not sure if I'd be thinking about this the same way five years ago.