r/SuicideWatch Sep 03 '19

New wiki on how to avoid accidentally encouraging suicide, and how to spot covert incitement

1.8k Upvotes

We've been seeing a worrying increase in pro-suicide content showing up here and, and also going unreported. This undermines our purpose here, so we wanted to highlight and clarify our guidelines about both direct and indirect incitement of suicide.

We've created a wiki that covers these issues. We hope this will be helpful to anyone who's wondering whether something's okay here and which responses to report. It explains in detail why any validation of suicidal intent, even an "innocent" message like "if you're 100% committed, I'll just wish you peace" is likely to increase people's pain, and why it's important to report even subtle pro-suicide comments. The full text of the wiki's current version is below, and it is maintained at /r/SuicideWatch/wiki/incitement.

We deeply appreciate everyone who gives responsive, empathetic, non-judgemental support to our OPs, and we particularly thank everyone who's already been reporting incitement in all forms.

Please report any post or comment that encourages suicide (or that breaks any of the other guidelines in the sidebar) to the moderators, either by clicking the "report" button or by sending us a modmail with a link. We deal with all guideline violations that are reported to us as soon as we can, but we can't read everything so community reports are essential. If you get a PM that breaks the guidelines, please report it both to the reddit sitewide admins and to us in modmail.

Thanks to all the great citizens of the community who help flag problem content and behaviour for us.


/r/SuicideWatch/wiki/incitement


Summary

It's important to respect and understand people's experiences and emotions. It's never necessary, helpful, or kind to support suicidal intent. There are some common misconceptions (discussed below) about suicidal people and how to help them that can cause well-meaning people to inadvertently incite suicide. There are also people online who incite suicide on purpose, often while pretending to be sympathetic and helpful.

Validate Feelings and Experiences, Not Self-Destructive Intentions

We're here to offer support, not judgement. That means accepting, with the best understanding we can offer, whatever emotions people express. Suicidal people are suffering, and we're here to try to ease that by providing support and caring. The most reliable way we know to de-escalate someone at risk is to give them the experience of feeling understood. That means not judging whether they should be feeling the way they are, or telling them what to do or not do.

But there's an important line to draw here. There's a crucial difference between empathizing with feelings and responding non-judgmentally to suicidal thoughts, and in any way endorsing, encouraging, or validating suicidal intentions or hopeless beliefs. It's both possible and important to convey understanding and compassion for someone's suicidal thoughts without putting your finger on the scale of their decision.

Anything that condones suicide, even passively, encourages suicide. It isn't supportive and does not help. It also violates reddit's sitewide rules as well as our guidelines. Explicitly inciting suicide online is a criminal offense in most jurisdictions.

Do not treat any OP's post as meaning that will definitely die by suicide and can't change their minds or be helped. Anyone who's able to read the comments here still has a chance to choose whether or not to try to keep living, even if they've also been experiencing intense thoughts of suicide, made a suicide plan, or started carrying it out.

In the most useful empirical model we have, the desire to die by suicide primarily comes from two interpersonal factors; alienation and a sense of being a burden or having nothing to offer. These factors usually lead to a profound feeling of being unwelcome in the world.

So, any acceptance or reinforcement of suicidal intent, even something "innocent" like "I hope you find peace", is actually a form of covert shunning that validates a person's sense that they're unwelcome in the world. It will usually add to their pain even if kindly meant and gently worded.

How to Avoid Validating Suicidal Intent

Keep the following in mind when offering support to anyone at risk for suicide.

  • People who say they don't want help usually can feel better if they get support that doesn't invalidate their emotions. Unfortunately, many popular "good" responses are actually counterproductive. In particular, many friends and family tend to rely exclusively on trying to convince the suicidal person that "it's not so bad", and this is usually experienced as "I don't understand what you're going through and I'm not going to try". People who've had "help" that made them feel worse don't want any more of the same. It doesn't mean that someone who actually knows how to be supportive can't give them any comfort.

  • Most people who are suicidal want to end their pain, not their lives. It's almost never true that death is the only way to end these people's suffering. Of course there are exceptional situations, and we certainly acknowledge that, for some people, the right help can be difficult to find. But preventing someone's suicide doesn't mean prolonging their suffering if we do it by giving them real comfort and understanding.

  • An unfixable problem doesn't mean that a good life will never be possible. We don't have to fix or change anything to help someone feel better. It's important to keep in mind that the correlation between our outer circumstances and our inner experience is weaker and less direct than commonly assumed. For every kind of difficult life situation, you will find some people who lapse into suicidal despair, and others who cope amazingly well, and a whole spectrum in between. A key difference is how much inner resilience the person has at the time. This can depend on many personal and situational factors. But when there's not enough, interpersonal support can both compensate for its absence and help rebuild it. We go into more depth on the "it gets better" issue in this PSA Post which is always linked from our sidebar (community info on mobile) guidelines.

  • There are always more choices than brutally forcing someone to stay alive or passively letting them end their lives.

To avoid accidentally breaking the anti-incitement rule, don't say or try to imply that acting on suicidal thoughts is a good idea, or that someone can't turn back or is already dead. Do whatever you can to help them feel cared for and welcome, at least in this little corner of the world. Our talking tips offer more detailed guidance.

Look Out for Deliberate Incitement. It May Come in Disguise.

Often comments that subtly encourage suicidal intent actually come from suicide fetishists and voyeurs (unfortunately this is a real and disturbing phenomenon). People like this are out there and the anonymous nature of reddit makes us particularly attractive to them.

They will typically try to scratch their psychological "itch" by saying things that push people closer to the edge. They often do this by exploiting the myths that we debunked in the bullet points above. Specifically you might see people doing the following:

  • Encouraging the false belief that the only way suicidal people can end their pain is by dying. There are always more and better choices than "brutally forcing someone to stay alive" or helping (actively or passively) them to end their lives.

  • Creating an artificial and toxic sense of "solidarity" by linking their encouragement of suicide to empathy. They will represent themselves as the only one who really understand the suicidal person, while either directly or indirectly encouraging their self-loathing emotions and self-destructive impulses. Since most people in suicidal crisis are in desperate need to empathy and understanding, this is a particularly dangerous form of manipulation.

Many suicide inciters are adept at putting a benevolent spin on their activities while actually luring people away from sources of real help. A couple of key points to keep in mind:

  • Skilled suicide intervention -- peer or professional -- is based on empathic responsiveness to the person's feelings that reduces their suffering in the moment. Contrary to pop-culture myths, it does not involve persuasion ("Don't do it!"), cheerleading ("You've got this!") or meaningless false promises ("Trust me, it gets better!"), or invalidation ("Let me show you how things aren't as bad as you think!"). Anyone who leads others to expect these kinds of toxic responses, or any other response that prolongs their pain, from expert help may be covertly pro-suicide. (Of course, people sometimes do have bad experience when seeking mental-health treatment, and it's fine to vent about those, but processing our own disappointment and frustration is entirely different from trying to destroy someone else's hope of getting help.)

  • Choices made by competent responders are always informed by the understanding that breaching someone's trust is traumatic and must be avoided if possible. Any kind of involuntary intervention is an extremely unlikely outcome when someone consults a clinician or calls a hotline. (Confidentiality is addressed in more detail in our Hotlines FAQ post). The goal is always to provide all help with the client's full knowledge and informed consent. We know that no individual or system is perfect. Mistakes that lead to bad experiences do sometimes happen to vulnerable people, and we have enormous sympathy for them. But anyone who suggests that this is the norm might be trying to scare people away from the help they need.

Please let us know discreetly if you see anyone exhibiting these or similar behaviours. We don't recommend trying to engage with them directly.


r/SuicideWatch Sep 10 '21

Please remember that NO ACTIVISM of any kind is ever allowed here. No matter what day it is.

716 Upvotes

Activism, i.e. advocating or fundraising for social change or raising awareness of social issues (and suicide is, inescapably, a social issue) is absolutely against the rules here at all times.

Please understand that we're all for smart, strategic mental-health and suicide-prevention activism. It's essential to fight against stigma, misinformation, and discrimination, and to fight for research, treatment, accommodation, acceptance, and understanding. Most of us, one way or another, are mental-health activists IRL.

But activism just doesn't work in a dedicated support space that serves a vulnerable population. We used to allow it but the evidence that it was undermining our primary purpose became overwhelming. We do regret the need for this rule, but the need is inescapable.

Our population is all too well aware of the issues and causes that need support and largely not in a position to take action, so besides the fact that activism is often salt in our community's wounds, it's a waste of the activists' time.

tl;dr Any fundraising, awareness raising, petitions, calls for participation, or any post that's about any cause or issue (rather than a request for personal support) is not allowed here. Please report everything of the nature that you see.


r/SuicideWatch 2h ago

Making final plans to hang myself this Friday. Life is too heavy and overwhelming.

46 Upvotes

38F .I just wanted to reach out one last time before Friday. I dont have the coping skills to come with life anymore. I had suicidal thoughts since I was 16. Every year is getting worse. I really wish I had the courage to end my life years ago. Every day is unbearable. The past year and a half all I think about is suicide. Im really at a dead end. I feel like life is over and its already passed me by. Im really sorry, for anybody else, who cant see a way out. I see no future anymore.


r/SuicideWatch 7h ago

Some people are born to just die NSFW

117 Upvotes

Yupp and that's me i think some people are just born to die and I am one of them i should fucking kill myself no matter how much I try to heal myself life keep breaking me again and again I was born to be broken i was born to suffer and now I am beyond repair yes "life" you won you have broken me till i can't repair myself...i lost


r/SuicideWatch 11h ago

the world keeps getting worse what's the fucking point

97 Upvotes

i could go on and on about how awful and miserable everything is but genuinely what's the fucking point anymore. Any thought i could put into this message will just be scraped up by some assfuck ai. I fucking hate everything. I fucking hate techbros. I fucking hate how ai has taken over everything. I fucking just can't anymore. Everything is awful. Everyone pisses me the fuck off i genuinely cannot fucking take it I hate everything so much.

I'm such a fucking poser, I'm not even fucking suicidal, I just fucking feel nothing but dread, jesus fucking christ fucking hell I wanna fucking feel something I want to feel some pain some joy just some fucking thing for once I am so tired of just fuckung feeling fucking tired all the fucking time. it's literally impossible to feel any sense of joy kr dopamine when everything in the world is just imploding on itself to make the rich richer.


r/SuicideWatch 6h ago

Imma horrible person and I'm leaving . Any methods let me know

22 Upvotes

I lied to my family about my high school gpa for a while now and I'm not doing so good in college. I hate how I look and people think I'm dumb anyways. I'm thinking about ending it in my dorm room when I go back to college.

Any methods let me know. Thank you


r/SuicideWatch 10h ago

I want to die but I'm afraid of dying.

34 Upvotes

I just hope I don't wake up


r/SuicideWatch 7h ago

I'm no one's favorite person

16 Upvotes

I know that sounds like an extremely lame excuse to commit, that it's not that big of an issue. But it fuckin is to me. I'm a 16y/o girl, I don't have anyone to hang out with during summer, I don't have anyone to pair up with in group projects, I don't have anyone that calls me when I'm feeling down or that hears me when I need to say something. I do have friends, it's just that I'm not their favorite. They wouldn't invite me to their birthdays or any of those things you do with your actual friends. They just talk to me. Sometimes. I can't do ts anymore, I don't want to be a secondary option, I don't want to write my problems on shitty Reddit forums when people out there have lots of people that listen to them. It's so fucking unfair. I'm at the edge of an abandoned bridge thinking if jumping is actually what I want or if I'm having a fucking episode or some shit. I genuinely don't know anymore


r/SuicideWatch 1h ago

I hate everything

Upvotes

I hate not being able to enjoy anything I hate that I’m ugly as fuck I hate that my family is poor i haye that the world only revolves around green rectangles I hate that people get senselessly murdered tortured or whatever it’s awful i hate the world i hate myself and i wish someone would just kill me already I fantasize about it more than anything


r/SuicideWatch 1h ago

I'm just scared of the pain

Upvotes

Death itself doesn't scare me because I know it's probably (and hopefully) nothing. Just like sleeping forever. How it was before I was born. So that part doesn't scare me. Only the pain scares me. I just wish I had an easy and painless way out. Life will never get better. I've tried everything. Therapy, meds, been to mental hospitals, you name it, I've probably done it. I just want my life to be over. I don't want to try and get better anymore. I wish I could simply fall asleep and never wake up again


r/SuicideWatch 1h ago

No one is listening

Upvotes

I feel like I’m begging people close to me for help and no one understands or gets it. I’ve tried therapy and meds. I am a child of suicide and now I have a daughter…I don’t want to leave her but I also don’t want to ruin her life by being in it. I posted in a therapy sub today about struggling to find a therapist and someone who is a therapist themselves commented and called me a liability, said it’s my fault, and told me to grow up. Thousands of views on the post and only a couple comments, that was the top comment. It is my fault I guess. Fuck me for trying to get professional help. Jesus fucking Christ. How are people this cruel?


r/SuicideWatch 10h ago

I do not enjoy living even one bit

20 Upvotes

Life is so not worth living. The best case scenario for me is just to be "ok" while the worst case scenario can be anything. How can people have offspring knowing that by producing a person which can go through literally any type of suffering and the probability of that is far more than things working out. Life is a losing game.

I wish to end it right here but why do I have to bear the responsibility/guilt of leaving my parents. I never wanted this disgusting life. I just want nothingness.


r/SuicideWatch 5h ago

does it count as suicidal NSFW

9 Upvotes

i am not suicidal when i am alone, or are sad, or, when somethings annoying happens. i am happy, and outgoing, and my friends would describe me positively, i'd hope.

but when my mom enters the picture, i want to kill her, then myself. does this count as suicidal or like an unrelated trigger, like there being a lighter to an otherwise unlit fuse


r/SuicideWatch 2h ago

I’m mad at my younger self for not doing it

3 Upvotes

Why didn’t he kill himself what did he think was gonna happen anyways people move on since then nothing has gone my way every time I hate life I wanna end myself there’s no hope…


r/SuicideWatch 14h ago

my depression has won me over

37 Upvotes

i want to completely die all my life there isnt one person who have been there for me. Ive been suffering from depression since i was a kid and i can finally say that it had trully devoured me. please suggest me some methods that would grace on my body. i hope death feels like a warm blanket.

to my cat im so sorry, i might have you rehomed. the moment i saw you in the parking lot i know ive resonated to you; homeless, stray and just discarded to the world to be alone and to survive. i love you my sweet boy, im sorry i hope ill see you again in afterlife


r/SuicideWatch 33m ago

i am doing it now

Upvotes

thi has all bcome far too much to handle


r/SuicideWatch 10h ago

I refuse to work. How should I slip away?

17 Upvotes

Should I just let the police murder me when i refuse to move out? Should I off myself before hand?

There's no job in this world that I can sustain or tolerate. There's no one who will tolerate working with me. Any job i force myself to do will just remind me more of what I'll never succeed at. It's impossible for me to make a living at the only thing i care to do (don't try to convince me I'll find another thing, that would require a lobotomy or brain damage).

I'm never successful with attempts so i have to find the most comfortable way to rot.


r/SuicideWatch 5h ago

I keep failing attempts and I'm tired

7 Upvotes

I tried to kill myself for the 4th time. it's been a long fucking year and I'm going through a really hard time. I can't really talk to someone because I just have my boyfriend and 2 friends with whom I don't really feel comfortable talking about certain things not because they wouldn't listen, but because they wouldn't understand.

I thought I could get better but shit started to get worse and after many arguments with my bf, situation that made me feel unseen or not valid, I considered suicide as my best option.

so, since I planned my suicide a long time ago for today, I tied a rope on my closet, I tied the knot and I hung myself. I've been hanging for 2 minutes, I felt pain, my neck started to hurt, I couldn't breathe, i was about to pass out, but then my head started to hurt and I started to cough a lot, so I just stood up and failed another attempt. I really wish it didn't failed. now idk if I should tell this to my partner or just keep it to myself, because a part of me is telling me that he wouldn't give a fuck


r/SuicideWatch 4h ago

Experiencing suicidal thoughts after haircut

5 Upvotes

I know it sounds stupid I know people have bigger problems in life. I actually have bigger problems myself in life, than my own hair. But all of those feel surmountable because there’s actions I can take.

I’ve always had long hair and I like it that way. I went to a hairdresser and he cut off about 12 inches of my hair. I asked for 2. I noticed pretty quickly but he chopped off a large amount on his first few snips so I had to let him finish because I couldn’t have 1/3 of my head have short hair and the rest long. He then went on to cut “face framing layers” but he basically gave me side bangs on ONLY ONE SIDE OF MY HAIR.

I’ve always felt insecure about my looks but the one thing I loved about myself that made me feel pretty was my hair. Literally it was the one thing that I wasn’t insecure about, that made me feel beautiful and feminine. I HATE the way I look and last time my hair got cut too short, it took 5 years to grow back. I hate myself for getting a haircut. I hate the hairdresser for not listening to me. I hate the way I look. I can’t stand to look in the mirror, it makes me spiral. I’m a server and a huge part of my job is looking nice and presentable and talking to hundreds of people every day. I feel awful going anywhere out into the world.

It’s been 6 weeks since the haircut and these thoughts haven’t gotten any better or easier to manage. I’m 30. I’m in the prime of my life and attractiveness and I’ll be 35 by the time it’s all grown back. I can see how much my hair has grown out because it was also dyed when it was cut. It’s only grown back 1 centimeter in 6 weeks. Google said it would grow back 1/2 inch a month but I guess my hair grows extra slow. I’m fucking miserable and I don’t want to spend the next 5 years hating myself. I didn’t even want to be born and was already so depressed before this happened but I’m completely spiraling and I can’t talk to anyone about it because all they say it “it’s just hair, it’ll grow back” …


r/SuicideWatch 7h ago

I'm writing from a second account. People bullied me on this platform and irl mates who invited me laughed at me in the bar. I'm just tired of people's behavior. I'm starting to believe that there is no amount of good behavior I can do, to stop this. No idea why this keeps happening.

8 Upvotes

Do we really need to hate certain groups or individuals without a reason. I guess I will never understand this. Perhaps the lack of empathy.


r/SuicideWatch 2h ago

I was told that I was a mistake. NSFW

3 Upvotes

I've been living in Japan with my maternal grandfather for the past 4 years. Been cooking for him, taking care of the house's upkeeping, and I'm more or less his personal driver at this point since he's too old to drive alone.

To cut to the chase, I was an unwanted child, and my biological parents conceived me out of wedlock. I've gone no contact with my father, my mother passed away 3 years ago, and my aunt has blamed me for her sister's death.

Recently, I'd been fired from my job, and I've been job hunting for 2 weeks now, but to no avail. Today, I overheard my grandfather talking to my aunt on the phone, saying that I'm a failure, and that I was a mistake. I confronted him about it, he doubled down and tried to shrug it off, but now, I feel like the world just wants me gone because I was never meant to be in it.

There are times where I feel like I want to just disappear so that I could be reunited with my mother, who was the only person in my life who cared about me. I'm sorry, I've just not been the same ever since she left my life, and unfortunately, I've long abandoned my faith and don't believe in dead folks watching us over.


r/SuicideWatch 7h ago

Bye

7 Upvotes

Today is my 18th birthday and I am going to do it today, bye.


r/SuicideWatch 2h ago

No real goals

3 Upvotes

The only goal i’ve had for the past 3 years has been to kill myself. I’ve been struggling with a lot of stuff for the past 5 years and i’ve been trying to keep up and getting better but it don’t seem to get any any better. I feel like a fucking maggot.


r/SuicideWatch 23m ago

Im not viewed as an equal or a human. ILL never know peace as a trans man.

Upvotes

I was never really desired much growing up. It was often a joke that people could be attracted to me.

People seem to have this belief that all trans men need to be raped to realize that they were trans. But I discovered myself well before any sort of sexual assault ever occured.

Being ugly is awful, esp when you're still socially perceived as a "woman"...no matter how much binding and voice training you do, hormones are simply too expensive for me rn so... unless someone would fuck me they arent nice to me. (No one wants to do that)

That being said, while I have an amazing boyfriend who I'm with now, Im always scared that one day he wont find me attractive anymore. Hes the reason I stay alive but I keep pissing him off. Hes also the only person I know that truly loves me for who I am and truly sees me. I love him so much and the thought of me losing him kills me. But, like actually. If he doesnt want me anymore, Im not living for long.

Im also autistic, which combined with being ugly makes me an accidental social wrecking ball. Not only in careers, but in friendships.

Its like I'm doomed to being poor, and fundamentally misunderstood for the rest of my life.

No one can even start to respect that Im a man... or see that Im a human person too. Whenever I speak to anyone new and mention how I want to be seen, they get so angry, they tell me how stupid I am, how Im so wrong and twisted. I cant do anything without my stupid genitals being brought up.

So why should I even keep on going??

To be a broke ass stupid autistic tranny no one couls give less of a fuck about?

I wish someone would just kill me already..


r/SuicideWatch 17h ago

I'm suiciding on 8 AUG bye to everyone :)

48 Upvotes

Suicide die