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 need help. I really do want to commit suicide. I just tried it a few weeks ago and failed. I’ve tried over 30 antidepressants, Spravato, ECT, many, many therapists, and inpatient programs. I am so devastated by my life, I don’t want to live anymore.
Wanda, I’m sorry you’re hurting so badly that you want to — and even tried to — end your life. It’s so frustrating when things continue to get worse, even with so much professional help.
Any advice I have to offer is in the service of staying alive, so you might not want it. But just in case… I imagine you know about the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline, as well as the Crisis Text Line at 741741. In addition, you might find comfort in speaking with others who feel the same way as you, which is possible at Reddit’s group Suicide Watch. That might sound like paradoxical advice, because I’m steering you to a group where others discuss their wish, and sometimes plan, to die. But knowing you’re not alone can offer solace, as can hearing from others who are making it through. I also list other resources here.
Whatever the case, I hope you stay and find relief soon. Thanks for sharing here.
Truly, nothing makes me want to survive. Even while learning skills like DBT and CBT, they simply don’t work anymore. I have limited family and couldn’t have children due to infertility.
I tried building a life worth living through volunteering, a public service career and a silly notion that a service-oriented life would ease things.
Over the years, friends have left without replacements. The reasons and seasons shifted and the sunsets have faded. I couldn’t dare call anyone that I used to. I don’t have a pathway, outside of therapy, to even begin unpacking the enormous pain, shame and guilt I feel for my existence. A person without a family is like a rudderless ship without a destination.
I’ve amassed a decent amount of wealth and I recently reached out to my nieces who are the only two people that I have any hope of being there for me as I reach advanced age. I wanted to discuss leaving my estate to them, but they couldn’t be bothered to respond. I guess that’s what happens when your gray matter gets hijacked by tik tok & k-pop. Or, perhaps you have a couple of kids and your idea of a relationship is sending family photos from Disneyland when your uncle donates a substantial annual amount into their college 529 plans in addition to reaching out in earnest telling them that you want a deeper relationship with them, only to be shunned. They don’t even know that I want them to be heirs to all I’ve worked hard for. A part of me gets up every day to do good for them and I think about them every day. I accept the fact that my relationship with them, and theirs with me, is just a construct and a projection. It’s not authentic family connection. They don’t know me and they don’t really wish to.
My parents generation demanded respect. I have sought to cultivate family relationships based on mutual understanding, joy and love. For some reason, I haven’t been able to make anyone feel an impact. I guess that’s what happens when distance, projection and a lack of understanding replace genuine connection. Can I blame them for what feels like empty gestures? Do they even know how their actions make me feel? It’s not for a lack of trying really hard to build something with them, but I’m not even their uncle by blood, so it’s already a weak bond, but it’s the only substantial bond I can think of without a family of my own.
There’s a part of me that wishes that my values and influence would have some sort of echo, but I’m going extinct, as we all will. Some folks have the drive and ambition knowing their legacy will ring on well past an inheritance. I don’t want to sound transactional, but at my age, I really do need to plan a will and some kind of heir to what I’ve worked for.
Given the new administration’s hard core philosophies about efficiency and nods to naziism, without a family, I guess now I’m probably just a useless eater.
The other day at the doctor, I suffered the injustice of denying to fill out the PHQ 9. One assistant told me “you filled it out before.” Another, different assistant came in and implored me to fill it out and I said that I’m here for my meat suit – a sprained ankle doesn’t need existential questions and I politely declined. Finally, the doctor comes in and asks me if I’m homicidal (geezus!) or if I want to hurt myself. I lied to her. It’s not that I want to hurt myself or throw myself from a bridge, but I would love to have a conversation about going to a place like dignitas where I can have a nuanced conversation about dying on my own terms because my legacy is to die alone in my house.
I’m not mentally ill, I don’t think. I’ve just played the 4D chess, I’m not transactional, I’ve tried so hard to cultivate love and shed callous from my heart and give love to those around me. It just feels like a rock I can’t move on my own anymore. I’m tired and I tried. I know that soon I’ll stop trying because I just don’t fit anywhere and it hurts so much.
Thank you for listening.
Wow. You sound like a much much better, more industrious and articulate version of me.
What’s left of my family feels actually much worse than I think I’d feel if they didn’t exist. (And the worst part is that my sense of obligation to them keeps me alive when I am sooo ready to be done). It sounds like you may be in a similar bind with your nieces. I bet there are some foster teens that would love your attention and assistance m.
I see people (on FB) with friends, saying that ‘friends are chosen family.’ It makes me wish…but in the state I’m in, I really don’t think I could make a friend if I tried. I had kids and (with loads of “help” from my ex, etc), I apparently failed miserably as a parent .(I wanted to work with foster kids before I got entangled with, further damaged by and pregnant with my ex).
And now I feel obligated to stay alive in my empty isolated world, just to avoid making things worse for them by suicide.
You have a PhD in being a Licensed Clinical Social Worker???
Steve, my PhD is in social work more broadly, and I am licensed by the state of Colorado to work as a licensed clinical social worker. There are some programs that offer a PhD or DSW in clinical social work, but the license is separate.
We know a lot about the necessary and sufficient factors for high risk of death by suicide. I’ll use Joiner’s interpersonal model because I think it’s the best known of the reputable, evidence-based ones. The two necessary factors in this model for suicidal desire are lack of belongingness and burdensomeness. So if we offer people connection and opportunities to contribute, that seems like the obvious way to not just reduce risk, but help them feel better. Of course, how to do that effectively is neither easy nor simple much of the time, but I think operating within that kind of a framework (taking away factors that are necessary for high risk) is super helpful for focusing our efforts.
The sense of Belongingness can be enormous if we experience life as a continuous uphill battle as that battle becomes itself a burden. We do not necessarily have to feel that WE ARE a burden as other factors come into play such as having to always work to pay the rent whilst fearing that our job may end (l am in the situation and my job is coming to an end).
I feel that if we can find OUR OWN PURPOSE, this can be a starting point but like others have said, it isn’t always easy. It takes time to find our purpose and it can take strength to follow that purpose (once found) if people around us do not support us.
I had a friend in this situation who decided to join a non-mainstream church and move to India to help the poor. Everyone thought this was a bad move and exerted a lot of pressure on him not to do it. But he did.
After years of wanting to die, he found HIS PURPOSE and last l heard, he is still alive.
I haven’t found it yet, but if I do, I might get to tell you.
I love this comment in this moment I’m feeling right now.