some of you on here may know - and if you didn't please don't be offended or alarmed, this is something i was keeping super close to the chest for a long time - but for a several year long stretch, i was on all sorts of points of the spectrum of suicidality

while this is something i absolutely carry with me long term, it's not something i'm currently battling with, and it's been a couple years since i was in any even arguable danger

all things are relative of course, but the important clarification to put out ahead of everything is, i'm actually doing great these days, and the skills and resources i'm now working with seem more than up to the task of dealing with any of the long term mental/emotional issues i'm carrying around with me

that all said, there is one very adulty, basic, often simple thing that i haven't been able to work out since moving past the dangerous parts of this issue:

obtaining life insurance!

i have been straight up told by the last several companies i've tried to get insurance through that as a formerly suicidal person formerly on psychiatric meds for depression and mood stabilization, i am uninsurable under any of their plans

i'm not slotted into "high risk pools" like i understood was a possibility, but straight up uninsurable

i do have one small policy that yale took out on my behalf when i started working for them, and before i actually went to see any doctors, therefore before any of this was a reported problem

but that's not really anything significant

that said, i do have loved ones, and i do have debts, and should i ever die unexpectedly, i'd really like for them to never have to meet

does anyone have any idea how someone dealing with suicide or mental illness goes about getting life insurance after that's part of their medical history?

i feel like i've been all over the place looking for this answer and i'm coming up really empty

I don’t off the top of my head but i can absolutely look into it

I’m actually astonished this is the case because I was pretty sure insurance companies handled this by having a “suicide? Fuck you no payment” clause

they do!

sort of

most policies actually have a grace period

Yeah, that I knew

you have to pay into the policy for either 2 or 3 years before suicide benefits will be paid out

So, one thing I would do is to see if your employer has an optional health insurance addition

I got one through my job that is portable and had no medical exam

and high risk pool policies either have no grace period, that's just a forever thing (this is legally dubious), or have a longer one like 5 or 6 years

and the optional health insurance addition might have increased death benefits?

Like at my job we have explicitly a life insurance thing beyond what the org offers

https://your.yale.edu/si... here this might not be your specific job category

But it looks like open enrollment you could get up to 2x your base salary w/o EOI

Without access to the full plan documents (and LI is not my specialty anyway) I couldn’t tell you if they have gotchas

Since insurance is a state by state thing you might have better luck searching something like “how to get life insurance if I was once suicidal {state name}” or at least that is where I would start.

ah, yeah, this was where i first started my journey

i tried with them while i was actually in the middle of all the suicide stuff, and they basically said "people actively in treatment for this can't be insured by us", then i tried after and they said "people with this in their medical history..."

that was when i started looking for insurers that had high-risk-pool group policies, but even though those are supposed to be for my kind of situation, there's something that has kept me on the outside of the "insurable" group and i'm really not sure what it is

sorry, clarification: the "them" two messages ago was the university's supplemental insurer

Hmmm. I wonder if there are non profit orgs that help navigate this as there are for health insurance?

I can’t dig too much deeper right now but I will go on the hunt tonight before DCP ST meeting

i haven't looked for something like that, so i'll give it a shot. thanks a ton checking stuff out too!