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 DON’T THINK THAT IT IS THE RIGHT OF ANY ONE TO STOP SOME ONE FROM COMMITTING SUICIDE I AM FOR THE RIGHT TO DIE FOR HEALTH REASONS AND THAT INCLUDES EMOTIONAL AS WELL IT IS SELFISH FOR ANOTHER PERSON TO MAKE SOME ONE GO ON AS IF THEY KNOW HOW MUCH PAIN ANY ONE CAN TOLERATE
I Agree, NOT IMPORTANT!
Thank you!
I think that allowing room for the philosophical discussion of suicide (both sides) can be very cathartic and edifying, even for those who are propounding in favour of the right to die. I post on one of the very few forums on the internet that permits users to discuss philosophical arguments in favour of the right to die. Almost every other suicide forum on the Internet has a “happy thoughts only” rule, and the result is that the suicide-related threads just seem to be a case of users taking turns to espouse the same tired and insipid platitudes with each other (“suicide is NEVER the answer”, “please make an appointment with your doctor”). This is very alienating for people such as myself, who are unabashedly pro-choice in their beliefs, and as such are of little use for me. In contrast, I find that being allowed to be open about my own philosophical views (I’m not too interested in discussing my own personal circumstances) makes my suicidal despair easier to bear, because it helps to ameliorate feelings of social isolation. I see that you allowed my previous ‘pro choice’ remark to be published, and I am grateful for that. Hopefully you will not decide to make the rules more stringent to silence the ‘pro choice’ side of the argument
Mic, you can also check out our forum at chronicsuicidesupport.com for a philosophical discussion of suicide.
Stacy, it’s an interesting quandary we find ourselves in, isn’t it?
My forum is neither explicitly pro-life or pro-suicide, but I do find myself asking that any member who is considering suicide stop and look real hard at the permanence of their actions and the effect that their actions will have on others.
I’ve had to make the same decisions you’ve had to make. When someone logs in and is determined that suicide is their only option – and then can explain WHY it is the only option we talk with them until they “go away.”
My forum serves an entirely different purpose than your blog. It really hurts – and sometimes it hurts deeply – when a member determines that it’s their time. (Remembering SIASL, who was in such pain that he couldn’t find any relief. Articulate, outgoing and loved by everyone who knew him. In my mind he had valid reasons to “catch the bus”, but I still miss my friend.) I have determined that, for me, being as non-judgmental and helpful is my role.
Yours, on the other hand, is obviously to help those who are suffering from deep depression, among other problems, find that there is a way out of this “vale of tears” that doesn’t include “catching the bus.” Knowing how I feel, at my distance from the member of the forum, when one of them kills themselves – I can’t imagine the impact on you when a client can’t seem to find their way and suicides.
Your task, it seems, is to help and to guide – as such any pro-suicide bias would be completely out of place. As you well know, compassionate listening is the most important part of communication and then trying to guide us out of this hell is the next step … and one I see you doing well. Thanks//al
As an assistant administrator to Dragon’s forum, I too have worried about this. But I have to go on my own experience. When I found the site and started writing how I felt, other people said they had felt the same. I wasn’t someone to be “fixed”- I was accepted even though I was suicidal and they gave me the respect to make my own choices. I can’t say how much this helped me!!
However, as was noted above, ours is a forum. While it doesn’t always happen, there are times when people we had feared gone came back and told us they were doing better; or had gotten better but find themselves feeling suicidal again. It is not always a static post where you don’t see how life evolves, which is a primary difference.
As for comments, I’ve done the same thing as both you & Dragon, depending on how I “read” the post/comment- sometimes I’ll give resources if I feel they’re wanting help, other times I’ll sit in empathy with them and hope that listening is what they need, and yet other times I will try to intervene if possible. (That wasn’t someone on CSS, Dragon.) It’s a tough judgment call, and unfortunately I don’t think that any sort of standard response would meet the needs of you or the original poster- although it’d be a lot easier if it could!
The Dragon, what forum is that?
As someone who was chronically suicidal for 25 years and in therapy for 20 of them, ironically, one major factor that shifted my thinking was being in an online forum with people who felt the same way. Because my previous knowledge of suicidal people were those who were briefly suicidal but were now grateful to be alive, I assumed anyone who felt as I did was already dead. This increased my despair.
A forum is ongoing as opposed to one-time comments; however, this is also true of anti-suicide comments. Today, I’m writing hopeful words, but tomorrow I might be in the dumps. It helps people who are suicidal and those who care about them to know both sides.
Personally, if I wrote about how horrible I was feeling and my comments were blocked, I would take it as yet another invalidation of my existence. Sometimes just the chance to vent about the desire for suicide lessens the desperation.
As for protecting vulnerable visitors to the site, perhaps it would be useful to add a warning at the top of the page with the helplines that comments might be triggering and do not necessarily reflect the views of the site’s creator.
I am not going to tell you what to do and I am studying for the ministry in this area of concern. I can pray more effectively when I review someone’s story no matter how sad or bleak. Pray and follow your heart.