Medical Coma for Emotional Suffering?

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I've read that sometimes doctors medically induce coma when a patient is in extreme physical pain. So why don't they do it when someone is feeling so miserable and hopeless and terrified of the entire world where so many things and people want to kill them or just make their life a living hell? Why do I have to be awake and conscious when the world is nuked or hit by a deadly pandemic or an asteroid crashes into it? I won't really be dead since we all know suicide is a sin and everyone should die a natural, slow, miserable, excruciating, terrifying death. (Sarcasm. Obviously)

because emotional pain is a sign that something needs to be dealt with, not drugged. I had PTSD from a house fire as a child. my doc drugged me with barbiturates, which numbed but prolonged the PTSD. thank goodness this isn't done any more.

a certain amount of physical pain is useful in getting us to seek help. beyond that, physical pain disrupts sleep and gets in the way of healing, so drugging it away is beneficial.

I'm guessing that the idea is that after a while healing reduces the pain, at which point the person is woken up. With something like depression, when you wake up it'll still be there, so it's kind of pointless (not that I haven't wished for such a thing at times).

But what if while you are in a coma, people-eating aliens take over the world? You could wake up in their refridgerator... next to the mustard!

Seriously, its probably impractical from practical and financial standpoints alone. Who will pay for your hospital, bed and care, and how will you handle the rent, car payment, who will feed tabby, etc, etc. I think only a very rich person could manage it.

But the concept of getting away from all the day to day worries for a while is not bad. That is one of the things a vacation can be for, if you can afford it...

Been there, done that. Ten months on the maximum dose of risperidone basically amounted to a medically induced coma (not really, since I was more conscious than I appeared on the outside-- still awake, with limited mobility, limited verbal abilities, and limited cognitive function). I think that was the idea the paternalistic psychiatrist started out with-- give me a chance to run from the issues until they didn't look so bad any more.

Didn't work. All it did, was give them time to become entrenched. I was miserable and depressed when I started. By the end of it, I had nothing left to live for.

A medically-induced coma won't help. It will all be waiting for you when you wake up.

There is a character in David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest who requested this of her doctor. Strange book.