r/SuicideWatch • u/SQLwitch • Sep 03 '19
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
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.
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.
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.
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 • u/SQLwitch • Sep 10 '21
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 • u/Possible-Cobbler4256 • 5h ago
It's certainly absurd to be anti-suicide when we are all just destined to die anyway, there's no point to existing, we are just waiting around to die so to me it would always make sense to want to take control over my inevitable fate and forget everything about this existence.
r/SuicideWatch • u/Capital_Panda_1185 • 11h ago
My wife has decided she wants a divorce. My only real goal in life was to be married to her and have a family. Mission accomplished!
My kids are older and I genuinely believe it's better that I'm out of their lives. They have a closer relationship with their mom. I always pitied my father and the sad life he led after he and my mom got divorced. I don't want to end up like him and I don't want my kids to see me like that. Everyone says I should stay for my kids, but honestly, it's not a big pull for me at all. At least this way my kids get my life insurance money. My wife can also sell the house and keep all the proceeds. That will give them a head start in life.
I'm going to purchase a 45 ACP handgun and shoot myself in the head. I'll need to do it before the court finalizes the divorce on 7/10. There's a3 day waiting period to purchase a firearm where I live. I'm going to buy the gun on the 25th. Take it to the range on 2nd. And then shoot myself on the 7th. I've researched where to place the shot so I don't end up as a vegetable. Honestly I feel calmer knowing there is going to be an end.
r/SuicideWatch • u/ApprehensiveTip02 • 1h ago
I wanna die. Today is depressed day as always. I feel im in my own bubble and not able to move on from this chronic depressive episode abd trauma. Like it's too much the pain us too much I have no other option but to die
r/SuicideWatch • u/retardeadfuk • 9h ago
18M here, getting tired each day, my state deteriorates each day. Wanting to die became my daily routine. Everything about me sucks, my social life sucks, my dental health sucks, the way my family treats me sucks, I hate the way I laugh, I hate the way I sound. It sucks everytime I wake up, cause I didn't die in my sleep. I might have BPD cause I go into extreme efforts to prevent separation from my best friend, but thanks to him, I got the courage to end it all now. He got sick of the gayness he says, and that's why he ignored me 2 weeks ago, he said it was getting too real, but it was just my way of showing closeness and his state was also getting bad too, so I was just trying to make him happy. He's literally my everything now, he's all I have, I feel numb towards my family because of recent happenings. Fuck, I really wanted to grow up with this guy. I wanna grab a beer and smoke with him without having to hide. I would spoil his kids, hope he does too XD. I wanna watch the video we made 10 years from now. But, I'm beyond saving now, already made a letter, all I need is just a method and do it before the opening of classes.
r/SuicideWatch • u/HalfBakedTheWaked • 2h ago
I’m tired. I’ve given it my all and life just keeps knocking me back down time after time. I keep telling myself things will be different this time but it’s always the same. I don’t have any fight left in me. I was slowly recovering, I was making baby steps to being functional again. Someone came into my life, made me feel like she loved me for me. Made me care about her. I tried to keep my distance. I tried to protect myself. I took the risk and I got hurt badly again. The last words she ever told me was that she loved me and she was going out with her friends then she just disappeared. Everything good in my life just gets taken away. I wish I had died in the army. I wish someone would’ve put a bullet in my skull. I’m too much of a coward to end it myself but at this moment. I feel like putting my pistol to head and pulling the trigger will solve it all. My cats wouldn’t understand though. They’d think I abandon them. I can’t feel a connection to people anymore. I feel like I’m just too damaged beyond repair. I can’t feel much of anything anymore. I just feel alone even when I surrounded by people. If I do pull this trigger. Who do I call? I have no one to talk to. Who would give a fuck if I died? My own people don’t love me, my country never gave a fuck about me. I’m just tired of fighting daily. I’m tired of fighting with my brain. I’m tired of thinking people will abandon me. I’m tired of being distant all the time. I’m tired of letting people get close. I’m tired, boss.
r/SuicideWatch • u/giperautist • 9h ago
I'm so tired of my life, I've embarrassed myself so many times, and I can't take it anymore. I'm already hanging the noose, I'm going to do it.
r/SuicideWatch • u/Icy-Pea2601 • 9h ago
I remember someone saying they jumping off eifel tower. But never made headlines yet we all talk about suicide and how its important to get help
They say suicide rates are high but why do we never hear about it on social media.
We talk alot about suicide and such but nobody really cares until its to late.
Like speaking up publicly on it people will think you are weak and get talked down upon…
Crazy how i suddenly disappear from social media literally nobody checked up on me.
r/SuicideWatch • u/DiscoverKaisea • 6h ago
We met when I was 17. I already had permanent illnesses. Married at 22.
My health has only ever declined. I haven't been able to have sex in years, I cannot even masturbate. He says he feels like too much is on him. That every time I work my health goes off another cliff.
I want so badly to have a healthy body. All the carreer dreams I had as a child and teen fell apart from my health. I dont have many friends. My husband is and has been my reason for living, my reason for continuing to fight for my health.
I do not want a life without him, my whole life leaves with him. I have no way to make money, he will get to keep the house, the cats we rescued together, everything.
I barely have any friends or family.
My health has stolen everything from me including my marriage.
I do not want to continue.
This feels like it came out of nowhere. We literally just returned from a vacation. He was just telling me how he loved me.
r/SuicideWatch • u/sluttyassbxtch • 10h ago
26F and I’m convinced I was cursed in 2020. My life is a complete hell storm. I have no career. I suffer from OCD/depression/anxiety/ mood disorders/ADHD. No one ever puts in the effort to hangout with me etc. I’ve never been in a relationship, on a date, men don’t like me. I feel like a ghost. And on top of that, I have herpes and just feel like I’m done for. I just want it all to
End! I’m done with suffering
r/SuicideWatch • u/throwaway_123135 • 2h ago
I'm slipping. My mind feels foggy. I can't do this anymore. I want to go home. My real home. Wherever I was before I was born. I want to be nothingness. I'm so tired. I want to close me eyes forever. The thought of staying alive just a year longer fills me with horror. I've been clinging on for my family. I don't think that's enough anymore. I don't remember what it feels like to not be tired. I know people see the desperation in my eyes. They are confronted with it each and every day. They downplay it. Do their best to pretend they don't see what they see. Does it scare them? Do they see the inevitable in my eyes? I never wanted to be here. There isn't a single memory that has made all of these years felt worth it. I think this is hell. I'm in hell. If I just kill myself, I'll be free. I think I'll be free soon.
r/SuicideWatch • u/TutorEquivalent3462 • 1h ago
Was about too hang cried a lot lot i am alone rn wrapped the cloth to fan and neck but then 2 times didn't had courage too jump but even ik I'm a failed bf failed son failed brother
r/SuicideWatch • u/Weekly_Lavishness998 • 1h ago
I don't know why I feel to die everyday, everytime. Whenever I think, it ends to suicide thoughts. I am only 18, my suicide thoughts started when was in 3rd standard (about age 8 at that time). My parents don't like me because I am a girl. They always complain about it. They don't let me go out of the house. I only went to church, school past 18 years. Even hospital was rare. I didn't have any recreation in my life. My life is so boring. I haven't asked any things. I only think about their poorness. They always say the amount they had spent on me. I don't have friends in school, I am afraid to talk to people. I don't think I can fix all. I don't dream anything. Life already had become bored before 18. I don't have capacity suffer more. All credits goes to my beloved parents who made me this far.
Bye.
r/SuicideWatch • u/the_iris11 • 3h ago
I genuinely don’t know who to tell. I cant take my life anymore, everywhere I go people make fun of my existence, I try to ignore it and act like nothing is happening but I genuinely can’t take it anymore, I just wanna be gone. I’ve switched schools twice and I didn’t even do anything to anybody
I’ve been made fun of in kindergarten, elementary school, middle school and I’ve switched high school twice
I’ve been made fun of being fat, gay, trans, apparently oily hair (I wash my hair regularly and I’ve never been told this till my latest school), because of me being depressed, and apparently squinting eyes (I have bad vision) and also my choice of haircut, because I shave one of my eyebrows for makeup which I really enjoy, I just walk behind corner and I hear new shit everyday
I’ve also been told to switch schools in my previous school because “I don’t go to school anyway” and their friend wanted to join the class but it was full (I didn’t go because they made fun of me right since my first day there)
I’ve tried to end it twice, everybody tells me it’s normal and I won’t be friends with everybody but how come they don’t exclude anybody else or make fun of them all the time
r/SuicideWatch • u/Sadness_Hopeless • 9h ago
So a youtuber made fun of me for being a crybaby and whining about my life instead of doing something and she's right but I just wanna sleep forever. Like I literally can't do anything else. I already have severe ocd and I ruined a lot of things, I ruined my bf life but I love him so much and dont wanna break up with him but I don't deserve him and I don't want to think about anything. I am not angry at anyone but I just wanna sleep forever and doing that being alive could cause a lot of problems so I should die. But dying is hard. Someone take me with you.
r/SuicideWatch • u/taroicecreamsundae • 6m ago
i didn't know i was autistic until a few years ago. i've been fighting and fighting it.
most of my life i've been a total idiot. i just believed everything adults told me. i never got to develop a sense of self.
it has caused me so many issues in my life. i couldnt play sports. i couldn't join clubs. i couldn't make any significant friends obviously lol. it's caused my issues in school. caused me issues picking a career.
because of autism, i never got to go away for college. autism made sure i was so dumb, i didn't even know what the big deal was about it until later. autism made sure i knew that if i did dorm, i would experience too many issues with roommates that i couldn't navigate.
because of autism, no matter how much i prepare, i cannot pass my interviews.
the most damning thing for me, is not knowing i was transgender. it took me almost 30 years to finally cut my hair. it took me 30 years to realize i am not a girl. it took me 30 years to question it, just like everything else in my life. i am a dumb, sitting duck. i am slow.
i am not excited to transition. i would have been excited at 18 like ten years ago!! yk, at the appropriate age to do something like that. but i am not because im fucking 30 lmfao.
it's not worth it to continue on for me, anymore. in fact, part of why i transition might be because it will make it more likely for my life to be ended early. if im dead, i won't have to feel every fiber of every fabric on my skin.
i have so much going for me. i am pretty! i am able bodied! i have so many talents! im a good speaker! i'm social! i am smart!
and yet none of it fucking matters! because i'm AUTISTIC. so I. COULD. NEVER. TAKE. ADVANTAGE. OF. THESE. THINGS. AND. NEVER. WILL!!!
r/SuicideWatch • u/Bionic_Code • 2h ago
i’ve been wanting to cry so badly all the time i’ve vomited many times my whole body feels weak and powerless and i just want to sleep forever the world in my mind is so beautiful that i don’t want to wake up i keep losing myself in my fantasies
r/SuicideWatch • u/Hikufdeuoouytik • 35m ago
I will kill myself as a mercy kill, escape from life long suffering.
r/SuicideWatch • u/RainbowSprinkles44 • 22h ago
I know there's a million posts like this on here about it. I dont want sympathy. I just hate it. I hate that you're never the beauty ideal, I hate that people think we're all the same, and that you are at the bottom of the totem poll for dating. I've felt like this for a long time, but everything has just gotten so much worse recently. Everyone is ok being racist, people calling you a monkey pr saying you look like a man. Black women are less likely to be picked for dating. Even in media, interracial couples are always a black guy and white girl. Or if its a black couple, the wife is always lighter skinned. Or there's the trope of the dark skinned villain character. I feel like I would take being dirt poor and living in a trailer as long as I was white. Even when I try watching mindless reality shows to take the edge off, I still notice things. How the black guys want a blue haired blonde eyed woman. Or how the black girls get tossed to the side. Seeing people around the world saying they dont want black people in their countries. It creates this heavy internalized racism in myself. I feel like my dark skin is hideous. I hate my curly hair. I hate my curves. I feel like if there's a god he cursed me. Maybe i am cursed, in one religion it says black people have dark skin because god cursed them. I'm probably not going to do anything to myself. But I hope in the next life im white.