I don’t want to encourage people to kill themselves. I also don’t want to give advice on ways to die by suicide, or to advertise the supposed virtues of suicide.
Can you blame me?
Some people do blame me. Hundreds of people have submitted to this website comments that could be construed as pro-suicide. And I don’t publish all of them, because my mission is to help prevent suicide, not promote it.
Risky Comments about Suicide
There are two different kinds of pro-suicide comments:
First are the outright dangerous: the comments that exhort a specific person to end their life, provide detailed how-to descriptions of how to end one’s life, ask for information about to painlessly kill oneself, or seek a partner for suicide.
Then there are the comments from people in abject despair and misery who state they will kill themselves, or advocate suicide as a solution to life’s pains, or argue for letting people end their life — and assisting people in doing so — and argue against preventing suicide.
The overtly abusive or dangerous comments are an easy matter for me to decide. I reject them.
What I struggle with are the very painful, very depressing, and very bleak narratives of hopelessness that serve to justify the writer’s choice to die by suicide, or to criticize suicide prevention. In these comments, there often is no request for help – no allowance, even, that help is possible. There is nothing constructive to help a suicidal individual, only a bleak defense of suicide for oneself or others.
My Limitations in Responding to Pro-Suicide Comments
Ideally, I could respond at length to every dysphoric commenter, engage in a conversation about their suffering and fears, help them explore for themselves the pros and cons of suicide in their unique situation, help them to challenge any distorted thinking and come up with other ways besides death to solve their problems, try to connect the person with hope, coach the person in coping skills and ways to feel better, and help the person rekindle a desire to live.
This ideal is hampered by two major obstacles:
First, the conversation I described above is what happens in psychotherapy. It would be impossible, not to mention unethical, to provide psychotherapy in this forum.
Second, even if I could provide therapy in this forum, I couldn’t provide it to everyone who submits comments here. There simply are not enough hours in the day, given that I also have a full-time faculty position, a part-time psychotherapy practice, a family, and personal needs that involve petting cats, eating chocolate, sleeping, and in general tending to my own life.
So I mainly offer resources and information when I respond to a comment. This is why every page on this website states at the very top, in red, “Counseling is not provided on this site” and provides advice to call 988 or text 741741; those are numbers for the Suicide & Crisis Lifeline and the Crisis Text Line.
On the rare occasion when someone submits a comment announcing an imminent plan to die by suicide and providing identifying information, I call the authorities (or, in the case of minors, the person’s parents). But people seldom leave enough information for me to do anything to prevent their suicide.
Possible Next Steps for Readers’ Comments
This state of affairs leaves me with three options for the pro-suicide comments that do not fall into the territory of obviously abusive or dangerous:
- Accept no comments at all.
- Edit or, if necessary, altogether reject comments that present suicide as a solution or inevitability.
- Publish the comments extolling suicide without any changes.
Ridding the site of comments is not, to me, a tenable option. Many people post comments about their doubts about suicide, their experiences of healing, and other topics that can inspire hope. More than one person has remarked in their comments that the site – and sometimes specific comments by readers – saved their life.
Pros and Cons of Publishing Pro-Suicide Comments
As for comments that are not hopeful, publishing people’s narratives of their pain, hopelessness, and suicidal wishes can be helpful. Many people are terribly isolated. Some find connection here, in the comments sections. And they are able to say to others what they cannot say to themselves: You matter. Things can change. You are not to blame.
Healing also can occur when a person reads others’ terribly sad and hopeless comments and no longer feels so alone in their own misery, which paradoxically may give them a degree of hope. There’s also value for non-suicidal people who can learn from suicidal people’s stories and experiences.
Still, vulnerable people – including children – visit this site and read the comments. I worry about the potential for harm when I review a comment that describes in how to die by suicide, reasons why suicide is a solution, and the like. In general, I follow the blogging guidelines put forth by the Action Alliance for Suicide Prevention.
A Permanent Comment for a Temporary State
It’s not only that the pro-suicide comments might confirm a vulnerable reader’s conviction that they should kill themselves, too.
That’s certainly a big concern, but it goes deeper than that. When readers leave comments describing their painful, seemingly hopeless existence and vow to die by suicide or justify suicide for others, these comments freeze in time an aspect of experience as though it’s the commenter’s immutable truth.
The words on the screen will never change again. But suicidal individuals’ lives often do change.
In fact, even among the most hopeless and suicidal people, most feel differently in time. More than 99% of people who consider suicide do not kill themselves. Among people who survive a suicide attempt, the vast majority do not go on to die by suicide.
When someone posts here an absolutely hopeless and suicidal missive and then recovers, other readers will never know. Even as the person moves on, their words of abject misery and hopelessness remain unchanged for millions of people to see. This gives readers a warped view of the possibility for change.
What Would You Do?
So this is my struggle. Pro-suicide comments, even those that are not abusive, have the potential to do harm to vulnerable people. Yet I also do not want to sanitize the forces that drive people to suicide, or to shut down the conversation altogether.
For now, I have modified the Comments Policy to state that comments will be edited or rejected if they meet certain conditions; please see the policy here. When I publish a comment with my edits, I note that I’ve revised it.
I question if these limits are enough. I also question if they’re too much. So I ask you this question:
If you ran a suicide prevention website, what would you do about comments that describe a person’s decision to die by suicide, or more generally promote suicide as a solution?
If you’d like to participate in the discussion, please leave a comment below. Oh, and please first read the site’s Comments Policy.
Copyright 2017 Stacey Freedenthal, PhD, LCSW. Written for Speaking of Suicide. All Rights Reserved. Photos purchased from Fotolia.
I find it ironic that those are most vocally on the “pro life” team were the same people who basically sabotaged and rejected my attempts beforehand to build a life worth living. Then they have the gall to blame places where my choices are respected. They basically want to take away the only chance I have for peace and dignity.
Withholding a discussion about painless suicide methods does nothing – it only causes people to go for more gory and painful ways. You are not addressing the underlying reasons why we want to die. You are trying to rugsweep and redirect blame on others instead of actually listening and perhaps acknowledging your role in it.
Nor do those “infusions of hope” or hotlines do more then insult us. You and anyone else who tries it make so many assumptions that are false. Do you honestly think suicidal people have not tried to reach out multiple times? Most of us have tried talking about it, going to therapy and exhausted all our possibilities beforehand. We’ve thought long and hard about our decision, often for months or years. Labeling it an “emotional response” and assuming we’ll just get a counsellor is naïve and honestly degrading.
TBH as someone who considers themselves pro choice i am disillusioned with how many people who also call themselves “pro choice” and rightfully mock “pro lifers” tend to behave when it comes to the topic of suicide. they are gigantic hypocrites. they advocate for suicide prevention yet do nothing meaningful to actually improve quality of life such as fighting abuse, discrimination, and other injustices, similar to how pro lifers want to ban abortion yet have no plan for improving the lives of children once they are born. pro life arguments rest in claims that are either unfounded (e.g. post-abortion syndrome) or rooted in cultural and religious beliefs with no regard for the faiths (or lack of thereof) of other people and i’ve found that anti-suicide arguments are the same. the fact that so many people don’t see the similarities is extremely irritating. i sincerely hope one day these people snap out of this cognitive dissonance and look back in disgust at the time when society had such an unhealthy obsession with preventing suicide.
My son had suicide ideation since he was 10. He lived mostly a happy life. He played football for 12 years. Was handsome smart and funny and had many wonderful friends and family who loved him. He went to college and started having anxiety in his sophomore year. He went on medication and for him that was not the answer. He went on and off heavy medication for two years until finally we got him to a neurologist psychiatrist. He did great for two years with little or no medication. However he occasionally did think about suicide and spoke to me about it and swore he would never go through with it. He was just about to graduate college and had three classss left. He was connected with jobs and was ready to go. He had a beautiful new clothes for his job, had well thought out short and long term plans. He had it all together. He had anxiety over his finals and had done extremely well and appeared to be very happy with one easy final left to go. We don’t know what happened that night but we do know that he put a band around his neck knowing he could choke himself out. I knew my son very well and I think he put himself in that dangerous situation thinking he could stop and say f-off to suicide but it went to far and he lost consciousness. I am writing this so that any of you out there that think you can beat the odds by putting yourself in the dangerous situation of the attempt and stop when you want can kill you. I really don’t think he wanted to go and had he not gotten into the fight he would have been here today. There is always a winner and a loser in a fight. Don’t put yourself in harms way. Sending you all love and praying for you all to have strength. A forever grieving Mom.
Heartbroken mom,
I’m very sorry for your loss. What a tragedy! Thank you for sharing here in the hopes of helping others. I hope you will check out the Resources Page for this site; it has information about resources for people who have lost a loved one to suicide. Take care!