These days, anyone of any political persuasion can find reasons to despair. Dramatic social upheaval. Climate change. Wars. Artificial intelligence. Mondays.
If you wish you could die, or if you outright think of killing yourself, what keeps you going?
In another post, I asked, “What stops you from killing yourself?” to help you identify your reasons for living. Now, I’m asking because I want all the ideas I can get.
I’m giving a keynote talk at the American Association of Suicidology conference in April, on how to want to stay alive in dark times. Want to, because for many people it’s not enough to just survive.
True confession: I don’t really know how. The title is aspirational. I chose it in the spirit of Dale Carnegie’s famous self-help book “How to Win Friends and Influence People.” His book offers good ideas, but it doesn’t have fool-proof answers.
Similarly, I have many ideas about ways to want to live. Ideas based on my own suicidal crises. Ideas based on my clinical work as a psychotherapist. Ideas based on my research and scholarship as a suicidologist.
I have a lot of ideas, but I don’t want to miss something important. Which is why I’m inviting you to share in the comments below what helps you want to stay alive.
Yes, it’s kinda weird, isn’t it? I’m crowd-sourcing the ultimate life-or-death advice.
Reasons for Living when You Want to Die
To get your ideas flowing, I’ll share the results of a novel study. Researchers looked at more than 7,000 Reddit posts by people with suicidal urges and analyzed the reasons why they didn’t try to end their life.
The study authors identified 12 major reasons for staying alive, listed here in order of how frequently they appeared:
Friends and Family
By far, concern about loved ones was the most common deterrent to suicide. This showed up in 43% of the Reddit posts. In comparison, the next most common reason was cited only 10% of the time.
Specifically, people said they didn’t want to hurt their friends and family. They also mentioned wanting to spare loved ones from finding the body, organizing a funeral, cleaning out the person’s belongings, and other consequences.
Those same things weighed heavily on me in my own suicidal episodes. Once, during an especially bleak mood in Paris many years ago, I ruled out suicide because getting my body back to the U.S. would have been a huge hassle for my parents.
Purpose
Fulfilling responsibilities, working toward goals, and finishing projects gave many people’s lives purpose. This is reminiscent, to me, of that Robert Frost poem:
The woods are lovely, dark and deep,
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.
Curiosity and Optimism about the Future
Hope for the future. A belief that things would get better. Curiosity about what will happen in their life. Each of these kept people going.
It’s like that famous quote from Project Semi-Colon: “Your story isn’t over.”
(Sadly, the founder of Project Semi-Colon, Amy Bleuel, killed herself in 2017. But her message is still true.)
In my 20s, a therapist asked me, “Don’t you want to see what happens?” And: “Can’t you have the humility to acknowledge you don’t know what will happen?” Powerful questions, because at the time I felt certain my life would never get better. Thankfully, I was wrong.
Hobbies and Activities
What do music, masturbation, and Minecraft have in common? All were listed as reasons to not die by suicide. So were football, exercise, and books.
For myself, I’d add eating chocolate, petting cats, writing, traveling with my husband Pete, and swimming in the ocean as compelling reasons to stick around.
What hobbies and activities make life worth living for you?
Animals/Pets
A questionnaire called the Reasons for Living Inventory lists 72 reasons across six domains: responsibility to family, child-related concerns, fear of suicide, fear of social disapproval, beliefs about survival and coping, and moral objections. (You can see the questionnaire and learn more about it in my post, “What Are Your Reasons for Living?”)
Researchers use the Reasons for Living Inventory a lot, but to me it has a striking failing: it doesn’t include pets. Pets help people cope. Pets also need to be taken care of.
People have told me they don’t kill themselves because they don’t want to subject their pets to abandonment, an animal shelter, or euthanasia. As one person in the Reddit study posted, “My dog needs me.”
Pets factor so big in people’s lives that an animal shelter in Oregon started asking everyone who came to surrender a pet if they had suicidal thoughts. In the first three months, seven people were identified – and helped – as a result.
Intervention by Others
Intervention doesn’t have to mean calling the police or taking someone to the hospital. A shout from someone to “get down from there,” an unexpected visit, and other actions by others stopped some people in the Reddit study from following through with their suicide attempt.
There’s an oft-told story of someone who left a suicide note saying, “I’m going to walk to the bridge. If one person smiles at me on the way, I will not jump.” The medical examiner and a psychologist found the note after the person’s suicide.
It goes to show that you never know what impact a few words, a smile, or a little act of kindness can have on others.
Fear of Pain, Death, and/or the Afterlife
Everyone knows Shakespeare’s famous question in Hamlet, “To be or not to be?” In that speech, Hamlet’s main reason for being is the uncertainty of what comes after death:
To sleep, perchance to dream—ay, there’s the rub:
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come,
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause…
Hamlet goes on to say that the uncertainty “makes us rather bear those ills we have than fly to others that we know not of.”
These same fears of a harsh afterlife stopped people in the Reddit study. So did fears of regretting one’s suicide at the last, irrevocable moment, fear of physical pain, and overall fear of dying.
I have to say, similar fears troubled me when I was suicidal. I worried in particular that I might be reincarnated into a life of even more suffering, to teach me whatever lessons I didn’t learn this time around.
Transience
“This, too, shall pass” is a phrase thought to bring joy to the suffering and suffering to the joyous. Everything changes. Maybe not the situation – a dead loved one doesn’t come back to life, for example – but the intensity of despair and pain can change.
Apathy, Laziness
Suicide requires effort; the proverbial path of least resistance is to keep going. Who knew apathy and laziness could be life-saving?
Procrastination is life-saving, too, for that matter. Putting off suicide, thinking without acting, taking a long nap – all of these have helped some people survive.
Fear of Surviving a Suicide Attempt
People have survived suicide attempts with horrific injuries – paralysis, brain damage, blindness, to name a few. How tragic that the act they undertook to end their suffering only created more. That prospect was enough to keep some people in the Reddit study from acting on their suicidal thoughts.
Spite
I love this one! “I don’t want my haters to win,” one person posted on Reddit. You know what they say: “Living well is the best revenge.”
A recent memoir, The Chair and the Valley, gives a poignant example of surviving out of spite. The author, Banning Lyon, had been abused by doctors at a psychiatric hospital. When he was in an especially dark place, he remembered a friend’s words: “You can’t let the doctors win.”
Pharmaceutical Drugs
Some people credited antidepressants with saving their life. I believe they saved my life, too. This is a controversial topic, because other studies have reported that taking antidepressants caused harm. Stopping antidepressants also can be treacherous.
Other Reasons for Staying Alive When You Want to Die
The study authors also listed reasons that didn’t fit neatly into one of the above categories. Not having a gun available was one reason. Getting into therapy was another.
What Helps You Want to Survive?
What reasons in the Reddit study most resonate with you? What reasons do you have for living that the study didn’t capture?
And, most importantly, what helps you to want to live?
© 2025 Stacey Freedenthal. All Rights Reserved. Written for Speaking of Suicide.
I learned to hope through my recovery from decades of depression and a disabling suicide attempt in 2015. https://speakingofsuicide.com/2021/12/01/shannon-parkin/ My depression has been in full remission since 2018 which means I still live with mental illness but have learned coping strategies I use daily. My journey, After severe depression, a ‘rainbow lit up my sky’ was posted by Kaiser Permanente on all their social media on World Suicide Prevention Day 2024. The picture of my daughter and I at her college graduation in this article shows the joy I embrace now, which I was unable to envision during my years of suicidal depression.
I continue to learn from other suicide attempt survivors as I wrote in Suicide Survivor Stories Empowered Me to Live https://speakingofsuicide.com/2023/01/29/survivor-stories-empowered-me/. I have had the privilege of presenting my story more than 60 times across the US such as this presentation I gave through NAMI MD in April of 2023 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ffosr7su9yY
I have learned to celebrate life through leading/ co-facilitating more than 500 peer support groups through my volunteer work with NAMI and my paid work as a Certified Peer Recovery Specialist with On Our Own Frederick County, MD. Through these peer support groups, I understand that resilience is built through community. Through sharing our stories hope grows exponentially as I said in my acceptance of the Transforming Lived Experience award from the American Association of Suicidology in 2022. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nuMBm_BqjQI
During my five years residing in assisted living facilities, I learned from my fellow residents as I wrote about in my essay Embracing Hope through 6 foot balloons empowered-me/. https://pleaseseeme.com/issue-7/nonfiction/embracing-hope-through-six-foot-balloons-shannon-heath-parkin/
Early in my recovery I attended meetings of people who had experienced traumatic brain injuries as I have. I recall at one meeting, sitting across the table from a non-verbal young man who was wheelchair bound. I had given a long -winded description of an incident at the assisted living facility. The young man responded concisely through the talking board strapped to his chair with words I still have taped to my wall 7 years later, “It takes time to smell the roses.” This brave man who on the surface seemed so disabled taught me a wonderful lesson that day about the importance of relishing each moment of life to appreciate each joy the world offers. I have been keeping a daily gratitude log since April of 2020.
My children taught me to reframe my scars from my disabling suicide attempt. My right forearm has significant scarring from my injuries. On my right elbow is a skin graft that appears as an extra patch of skin. I recall while in the hospital, in a group session on the behavioral health unit, another patient refused to sit beside me, because she said that she did not want to ‘catch no tumor’, referring to my right elbow. After that incident, I asked if the skin graft could be removed, but was told my insurance would not pay for what they termed as ‘cosmetic surgery’.
For the first three years after my suicide attempt, I always wore long sleeves when I was around my children, so they would not see my scarring. In May of 2018, on a warm day, I asked at my faith community first my daughter and then her younger brother, if it would be Ok if I wore short sleeves around them. They each told me that they were ready to see my scars.
About two months later my daughter then 17 sat to the right of me in a meeting at my faith community. For the first 15 minutes she massaged the extra skin on my right elbow. At the end of the meeting, she turned to me and said, “Mom, it is Ok, you have a wiggly elbow.”
I knew then I would never again consider having my “wiggly elbow’ removed for it is a constant reminder of how life embraced me pulling me back from the edge my mental illness had taken me.
Shannon,
What a beautiful story about your “wiggly elbow.” What was a symbol of shame for you now is a reminder of your resilience. Do I see another guest post in your future? 🙂
Regardless, your story of recovery awes me. It sounds like helping others by sharing your story infuses your life with meaning, as do your children, your faith community, and all the things you’ve recorded in your gratitude journal. What a testament you are to survival. Thank you for sharing here!
Thanks for the encouragement to send you another essay. I am grateful for you and all you do to share hope with so many. I wish you the best with your presentation at the AAS conference. I know you will be great.
It’s my family that keeps me here. I have no dependents, but my brother and parents would be devastated if I killed myself (they’ve told me so). Otherwise I would be out of this horror show in a thrice. Fascism, cruelty, and the insoluble problem of climate collapse are things that won’t pass.
I suppose fear of the afterlife is what stays my hand. When I was a child, I had the fear of the devil and his hell quite literally beaten into me, then underlined by years of Catholic schooling and stewing in religious propaganda of all flavors. I no longer believe – if I ever did – but the fear of it remains.
I think to myself “what if Sister Mary Martha was right? What if there is a hell, and your decades of living sinfully without God – plus the mortal sin of choosing suicide – sends you there? At worst, you’ve got maybe 30-40 years of this garbage… do that, it’s eternal. Or worse, what if you’re actually already dead, maybe due to a previous self-harm incident, maybe due to something you don’t remember, and the attempt just drops you back in your bed the next morning because you are already in hell? What would that knowledge do to what’s left of your psyche? Better to wonder and leave it be than confirm it and be driven completely around the bend.”
If I could have one proven assurance that all that awaited was quiet nothingness, I’d pull the plug in a heartbeat. That terror keeps me here and in pain.
My partner of 41 years has dementia and is blind and is 85 years old. She has chosen medical aide in dying in Switzerland where you don’t need to have a six month medical diagnosis. We will probably be going in June. So right now that is my main reason for staying alive. I also just went through a very extensive 6 week IM ketamine treatment to develop my resiliency and to be able to see a life after she’s gone. It seems like it’s worked.
Karin,
What incredible challenges lay before you. I’m sorry for you and your partner and all who love her. And I’m grateful you’re working on ways to envision life without her. I wonder if you’ve looked at some of the classic books on grief — maybe not to read now, but later:
How to Survive the Loss of a Love (Amazon link — I don’t get any compensation from them, fyi)
Bearing the Unbearable: Love, Loss, and the Heartbreaking Path of Grief (Amazon link)
Finding Meaning: The Sixth Stage of Grief (Amazon lin)
Those are just a few of many. There also are some books on Amazon about anticipatory grief, which I imagine you’re experiencing now as you anticipate her death. So tender, so painful — thank you for sharing here.
Thanks. Actually someone I was really close to died in December of 2020 of cancer. He got diagnosed the same time everything got closed down with the pandemic. He choose to go through to the end and was in acute pain. Pain meds weren’t helping much. It was agony to go through this for nine months, not being able to do anything. I read a tons of books on grief at that time. I joined David Kessler’s online grief community http://www.grief.com which is a wonderful low cost option. There is a special section on death by suicide and the topic comes up frequently in the general forums. I’ve read most of his books. I will probably re-join after she’s gone.
I am annoyed at myself for it but I have Faith and like Pascal’s wager: Believe and you’re wrong you’ve lost nothing don’t believe and you’re wrong you’ve lost everything. I worry, not knowing if it is a real thing or not, that G-d would make me go thru the same Hell again, I have been going through for the last 40 + years with severe chronic pain and isolation another time.
I think often that my having Faith is a bad thing for me.
Lee,
That’s brilliant, I’m happy to have learned of Pascal’s wager. But I’m sad to hear that you question whether Faith keeping you alive is a good thing. I believe and hope it is, both for you and for me. 🙂
Thank you for sharing here!