We cannot enter another person's head and know their intentions or motivations. Sometimes they don't even know their own. We cannot make someone do what we want them to do, nor make them stop doing things; co-dependence, for example, is a belief that we have such power, if only we try hard enough, and putting all our focus on that other person rather than applying our power to the only person we have the remotest chance of controlling, our own self.
At some point, the healthiest thing to do may be to disengage and allow that person to be responsible for themselves, their decisions, and their actions. I recognize and have compassion for the potential pain that the one being disengaged with may experience, but there is also a danger of taking responsibility for such a person, and unless they are a child under one's care, they must be responsible for themselves, no one else can be. If they cannot be responsible for themselves, that is fucking hard for them to deal with, and for that I have compassion, but no one else can be responsible for them, either. That is one of the shit challenges of life.
In situations such as the OP mentioned, my gut check is whether I am responding out of pity. Pity tells me that I am being externally and/or internally led to lower important boundaries and take responsibility for another and/or allow them to victimize me, even if they do not consciously have predatory or manipulative intentions. I posted once about my experience with someone I called a suicidal vampire; for months he kept me wondering if he would live or die, and kept me emotionally involved in caring about him with calculated suspense. I finally had to stop giving him the benefit of the doubt and went no contact for my own sanity.
I look back at times when others have disengaged from me. Sometimes they did not believe what I was experiencing and abandoned me. That hurt. I had to deal with it, and even years later sometimes feel a bit of the pain and WTF-ishness. Other times in the past, I put things on others that was not theirs to own, or tried to draw from them things they were not willing or able to give. I now respect them for placing a boundary against me, because allowing me to continue to behave that way only reinforced my maladaptive behaviors. Being a social animal is hard, and it is a difficult fact of life that most growth comes from making errors, suffering for them, and learning the variety of lessons only experience can offer.
From painful personal experience, I know that, in general life situations, no one *causes* another to suicide nor to become successful. For example, relationships end; while one person may respond with suicide, another may learn from the experience and go on to seek new relationships and find a mutually beneficial one, while another may renounce relationships entirely but go on living. The one who ended the relationship owns responsibility for none of these responses.
In response to the OP, I think a potential solution to such dilemmas is the stance of pro-choice, allowing others to be responsible for the decision at any time to seek ctb, recovery, or other options, and to be responsible for pursuing the results they seek from such decisions, and to change course whenever they choose. We all need help, but to me, in the interpersonal realm, help is a stop-gap, such as a bridge to go from one place to a new one, or support and guidance for learning how to connect with one's own power. True help is not a means of allowing someone to fully rely on or drain anothers' power, because no one has enough power to fully support both themselves and another -- even babies have to learn to walk and feed themselves, humans have only a limited amount of internal resources fully support and intensely focus on another for so long.
