TAAndreas

I'm sorry both to hear you're facing this kind of problems and that you now seem to have lost a way to deal with it.

I reached out to the police for tevlon b/c a) I'm in the same country b) I felt I could properly assess the implications my action had c) I felt those are mainly positive (I actually did have the concerns you raised in mind, but felt I carefully weighed the pros and cons) d) If at all possible being forced to take a medical treatment is extremely unlikely here (and the vast majority of medical treatments is covered by your obligatory medical insurance here) e) Together with the other information I gathered the situation seemed way more serious than it would have seemed with the post's information only But also f) I generally do consider suicidal thoughts sth serious and not at all "normal" in the sense of being sth you don't have to take care of (which does not mean that going through what you paint to be the implications of a police call in your country seems like a proper way to take care of it for me).

I'm not telling you all this to justify, but a) to show you that I really did take my action and its implications serious and b) this was a decision tailored to this very specific situation.

I don't know what exactly you were about to post and I can of course only speak for myself but solely the fact that you're in another country already "breaks" the chain of arguments presented above that justified calling the police for me, so even without you telling me the implications you see a police call would have, it would be extremely unlikely for me to actually call the police on you.

More particularly that a) now you clearly voiced your concerns and disapproved of the police being called on you and b) you consider your situation not constituting immediate danger I can't imagine anyone still doing so.

Still: I can only talk for myself and as soon as you post sth publicly, you of course never know who will read it and how they will react.

Long story short: I really am sorry both for your situation and for me making you hesitate in taking a step that might help you in your situation. I don't want to convince you anything but I actually don't consider the risk of you unwantedly finding yourself in the situation you described when you explicitly state not wanting it.

Therefore, if you feel that this would help you, you might reconsider your decision.

To be fair: You seem not to be the only one, opposed of what I did considering the downvotes I got.

Great to see you here again and particularly great to hear these news! I was already relieved to see your HN submission in May and now I see that was the time when the first public contributions after your AskHN appeared on the GH profile you used here (What I didn't see is that you already used reddit again only some 3 weeks later)

The reason I contacted the police was that I wanted to delegate taking care of this to professionals. I'm not a psychologist and what I think might be a reasonable approach to helping out in such a situation actually might or might not be. (People seem to have very different approaches here from "I feel you bro" through "Hey it's not that bad" to "You can be really proud of x, y and z" and up to "C'mon, stop whining!" and even "It's actually your fault")

I'm very glad to see that this seems to have been the right decision. I wasn't too confident about it at first, b/c police really didn't leave a professional impression. When I read that post I was at work and my wife and kid were at home. They were quite shocked (and the neighbors probably somewhat "excited") that KriPo showed up at our place. Turned out, I was also right not to trust their research capabilities. I literally[1] stalked the sh*t out of you and sent them a good dozen of profiles together with your name, (work) phone number and address and the letter to your ex, her profiles &c. That may sound creepy but I actually really wanted to make sure they have all the information they need to reach out to you as fast as possible (I expected it to take minutes, not a week). Turns out doing so was both right and wrong: They really seemed not to be skilled investigators, but to the extent that some days (!) later they called me and told me they couldn't open the links.

So after that I really wasn't that full of confidence what concerns the police, so until I saw your HN submission in May I always thought about calling you but didn't really know how you'd react.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16403671