1. Talk to them about it. Let them know that you are there for them and that you know it's not their fault. If they trust you, they are more likely to try and talk to you if something is wrong.

2. Seek professional help. Someone who knows what they're doing will surely know what to do to help that person.

If you're talking in more of a broader sense, as in saving people who you don't know and preventing future tragedies, the best we can do is to spread the word. With more information about mental disorders out there, there is less blaming the victim and fewer tragedies happening.

So if a person thinks that suicide is the only way then you SHOULD NOT try to convince them to see things differently?  Seriously?  Because THAT is what I was implying.  Everything else is YOU INFERRING.  

That's just the simple truth.

Years ago, the wife of my first cousin was murdered.  It completely crushed him but he kept living.  The family gave him every bit of support they could.  Eventually he got his sense of humor back, his life started to return to normal, and he even got remarried.  Then one day he killed himself.  Out of the blue.  Of course, it wasn't out of the blue for him.  Everyone knew that his first wife had been his world but he hid everything related to that.  He kept it all inside himself, even though his family would have given everything to help him. 

That's why it makes me so furious when people act like this is something simple that can just be magicked away.  People try their best and it still happens.

My brother hung himself when I was thirteen. He was fifteen. There is something seriously fucked up in the way humans fail to connect this day and age.

God help me I want to find an answer to help people find connections.

A lot of people reflect themselves onto others so when they feel mentally fine they assume others could have that too with some effort,even physical pain gets looked down on if it isn't clearly in eyesight,i had some serious nervepains in the past and its so hard to explain to others because many seem to need an mental image of something damaged to focus on .

I think it's the way society is set up, and the way we're trending. We're isolating more and more, families are getting smaller, more single parents going it alone and less intergenerational households, more superficial Facebook friends and fewer real friends you can count on and even fewer best friends you can truly confide in and connect to, less willingness to be vulnerable around one another and more worship of the tough guy badass persona. Communities aren't really much of a thing anymore, as people tend to be more connected to strangers online than the people around them in their neighborhood. Meanwhile we have to work more and more to get by, having less time for what makes all that work worthwhile, and we're working for corporations that fail to appreciate the value of the human element. Obviously none of this speaks for everyone, but it's hard for anyone to avoid all of it.

We as humans just weren't meant for this psychologically. We still have the minds of hunter gatherer tribes as we try to face an industrial society moving into a post-industrial technological one. We're happiest when we have a small group of people to face all the challenges of life with together, something like the villages of old where everyone knew each other and everyone was connected to everyone. But most of us are lucky to have anyone at all, maybe a life partner if we can find one, a kid if we can afford it, parents if they're still alive and not estranged from you, brothers and sisters if they haven't moved too far away, maybe one real friend that you could tell anything. But too many people don't even have that. Ronnie Edwards didn't. And society seems to prefer it that way.

Ugh that was crushing to watch... I've loved that channel for years now (I really don't get the hate it's received and I was watching back when Matpat did his own editing),

Never really knew much about Ronine, but it seems that was true for most people. Just such a gut punch to hear anyone committed suicide, but even more so when it's someone so young. Drake's video about it was equally hard to watch as a guy who's attempted suicide multiple times and was apparently helped by Ronnie through it. The whole thing is just crushing.

Severe trauma mostly never goes away, it gets easier to live with but you keep the weight of what happened always with you and whenever something else badly happens to you the past trauma comes peeping again like it recently happened.

I can relate to this story because i lost a love that was my world.

Very sad to hear someone resorting to suicide, he must have felt horrible and hopeless to be pushed to that. Shame that he saw no other way out, there is always hope and suicide is rarely right the answer.

Before I had a really bad and distorted view on depression, I thought that it was almost like a choice or weakness of mind. I over simplyfied it, in a same way as many other do for it and for example weight problems.
Then it hit me, I got depressed and know I understand that its not that simple and its different for different people. Some isolate themselves, some bury themselves to work, some eat to ease the pain, for some its comes quickly, for some it slowly creeps and starts to lay its roots... Depression and other mental health problems are so varied that there is no one cure, there are many things that can help. Therapy and changing the way I view some things, helped me a lot, but it took a long time and wasn´t easy.

Making the problem more visible and reducing the stigmatization, can help many people who are afraid to talk, who fear to be labeled, so as others have already said, talk to people if you think that they might need some help and don´t be afraid to talk about your own problems or seek professional help.

I hate social media. At least in its current form. I recognize it has good potential, but as it is now, all the good it does could be done with just internet forums like this one (for connecting people with common interests), and instant messaging apps (for connecting friends). The rest of it is just more toxic than its worth.