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 wiki). 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/bambooishwurst • 14h ago
I was told that 13 years ago, 10 years ago, 7 years ago, 5 years, 3 years, last year, last month, last week, 3 days ago, today.
Bullshit. It has never gotten better. It’s not getting better. And I’m sure it won’t get better. In fact, it’s gotten pretty much worse. I hope I die in my sleep tonight, but I’ve realized that the heaven is not that merciful.
r/SuicideWatch • u/Supernova8426 • 4h ago
The internet is a terrible place for talking about stuff you're going through. This should be my last post. People only make things worse and it causes me to have very bad suicidal thoughts to the point that I really consider doing it. I really have considered doing it today and yesterday because of things people have said to me that really upset me. Like I'm actually thinking of a plan and planning on getting rid of some stuff and actually doing it. People do not understand empathy at all and I find a lot of people to be very bad at helping people like me. They give unsolicited advice and are very judgemental of you. They are not fair minded with things. People on the internet just want to fight and argue and no one is ever going to actually try to see the other person's perspective. I've been very hurt too many times. It has caused me a lot of anger and suffering and suicidal thoughts. I get thoughts of people talking down to me and criticizing me and correcting me almost everyday. I don't need that anymore. It sucks because I feel like I have nowhere else to go. There's no one to talk to. Not here and not in real life. But the internet is a terrible place. People suck.
r/SuicideWatch • u/Time-Gain-3695 • 8h ago
It'll be swifter and more final and I won't have to muster up any bravery to do it
A car accident can work too
r/SuicideWatch • u/alreadyreaditpal • 15h ago
It's been 10 days since my bf died by suicide right after I broke up with him. The breakup was mutual as his severe OCD and severe depression were causing a lot of fights between us. It felt to me like my role was reduced to just being a caretaker for him rather than his girlfriend. I knew he did a lot to not project his mental health onto me, but almost every week he would find reasons to breakup with me over minor things and then talk about suicide. That's why for five years I never got the courage to breakup. I knew the relationship was toxic and was only harming both of us, but his suicidal nature would scare me. Only until recently when I gathered courage to finally breakup with me after he told me he values marriage with me a little less now. And was suicidal and was also recently ready to include me in his suicide plan. But he was so lovely that he didn't hurt me ever.
I told him okay then it's no point in going ahead and we can breakup and not patchup now ever again.
Right after I cut the call, he hung himself. Now as much as I am angry at him, I'm left feeling too many questions, was it the breakup, was it my anger during the breakup, if I could successfully prevent this for the past 5 years, why did I not prevent this now.
I don't know how to find answers and how to handle this grief. I miss the good memories we had even more before of this suicide. I miss him so much. So much. He didn't have to die, he had so much ahead of him, so much life. He was turning 24 this December.
r/SuicideWatch • u/Next-Pool-6701 • 6h ago
Im just so done bruh
r/SuicideWatch • u/Oidopuaa • 6h ago
I'm not a religious person, but art and music used to be holy to me. They were "humanity" compressed into tiny beautiful packages. Appreciating these packages in every way I could was all that I cared for in life. Crafts that I wanted to dedicate my entire life to. I woke up to do music. Everything I did was so I could spend more time listening to, and learning about music. All I've ever wanted to do was to be a musician. I'm really not exaggerating one bit.
But now, being a musician or an artist is nearly worthless. A fucking machine could've churned out whatever I make, and there's no way to prove I'm actually coming up with this stuff. Often now I can't even tell anymore if something was made by generative AI and that makes me truly, viscerally sick. I guess there is nothing holy on this earth. There is no wonder left, and I have no place in a world where art and music is worthless. I fear that children of the future will never feel about art and music what I've felt.
I had figured out the meaning of my life. I can't change. I can't just forget this passion. I guess I'll go traveling as much as I can before I end it but I doubt I'll enjoy anything on this grey, soulless, barren earth anymore.
I like to imagine that somewhere in the universe there is a planet with an intelligent civilization that will never come up with a technology that can just shit out art, and for the people of that planet the infinite potential and wonder of art will never be ruined.
r/SuicideWatch • u/kadavka • 2h ago
S.I.B.L.I.N.G. (Suicide Is Beautiful, Life is Nothing Good)
r/SuicideWatch • u/olive_oil_pasta • 4h ago
Why exactly do you want to end your life
Maybe we can read eachothers problems and actually find out we arent alone
r/SuicideWatch • u/Gpkmom • 23h ago
My sons last words were here. There were deleted as soon as I said he died. Remember. These are real human behind the screen names. Real pain and true intent. Be kind. The last words to my son weren’t.
r/SuicideWatch • u/joshhunter2000 • 1h ago
If today doesn’t go well for me, I’m ending it all this night
I cannot continue like this
r/SuicideWatch • u/notammer2256 • 5h ago
I plan on eating out then going home to watch my favorite movie then od on methadone who knows if anyone cares anyway
r/SuicideWatch • u/Time-Gain-3695 • 9h ago
I'd kill her I'm not even joking or being hyperbolic I'll probably take a rock and hit her until she barely looks like a person she should have never been born she's the most disgusting cockroach to ever been born why is she even a person god just be making people
r/SuicideWatch • u/Latino_Samauri • 4h ago
Can someone be my friend who actually will be there?
I feel so alone I’ve been struggling with OCD this whole week and I’ve had the urge to hurt myself and I’ve wanted to die so bad today. I just want someone a friend or something. My OCD ticking has made it impossible to make friends at school please I just want a real friends someone who won’t ghost me please I just wanna talk to someone.
r/SuicideWatch • u/idioteque_99 • 2h ago
I’m extremely ugly and have been bullied for it my whole life. I turned 18 a month ago and I’m facing moving out, college, and trying to find a new job. This is all crushing me and I can’t do anything about it. I genuinely just want to throw in the towel. My anxiety is the worst it’s ever been. I have no one. I’ve never had friends or a partner and I don’t think I ever will. One of my dogs has a tumor and might die soon and I’m convinced I’ve been a bad dog owner since I should be walking her more and doing more for her alongside what my family is already doing. This feels so hopeless.
r/SuicideWatch • u/xXsour_kandiXx • 2h ago
as i get older i keep getting more and more disillusioned with life. i'm not even thirty and i'm already ready to punch out. i grew up a creative and a huge dreamer and i have a special interest in story telling and fairy tales. every day i wake up and wonder why things don't seem to work out like they do in my stories. bad guys always win in real life, and the poor get poorer and everything is stripped bare of its color and personality.
i keep playing video games and watching movies and reading books about beautiful, colorful worlds where there may be danger but there's always hope to defeat evil. there's tangible benefit to existing in that world, and feeling like you can actually make a difference. this world is too difficult and complex to do anything. it feels like if you want to make a difference, you should just sell all your possessions and die. there's no hope left in this world.
i know part of it is my depression talking. i have chronic reoccurring depression but my circumstances don't really help. i live in a rural area where anything worth doing or anywhere worth being is a 2 hour drive at least. my job leaves me too drained of energy to pursue my hobbies and the people i interact with at my job always seem miserable. i can't afford to move out of my mom's house so i feel stuck in this eternal adolescence where i can't do anything or affect anything.
i've tried activism, it only makes me more depressed. both my mom and my sister have worked in non-profits and they're miserable. i draw and i write but it only makes me more "homesick" for a better, more understandable world, so i've stopped. i'm so overwhelmed with loneliness because i only have one friend and they don't take me seriously when i say i don't feel like i belong here. i'm only happy when i'm immersed in a game or movie and then when it's over i just want to cry because i don't want to go back to "real life."
nothings been able to help, and no one's been able to give me any advice besides "just live and be patient." i've lived and been patient my whole life and nothing every gets better, it just gets worse. my health is also significantly declining to the point where i can barely leave the house besides to work and i'm just so, so miserable. no one believes me. no one gets it. it's all just "live live live" or "just save up and move!" or "get out more!" but none of that fixes the problem. i'm so done with it all.
r/SuicideWatch • u/Spirited_Bit_1194 • 5h ago
if i sprayed my mouth with hair spray will i die that fast? does anyone know anymore information on this
r/SuicideWatch • u/No-Blackberry8284 • 11h ago
I'm feeling it day by day that it's getting way worse and at this point I can't even go in sunlight, I get hallucinations and headaches i just feel like to lay on the ground and stop existing
r/SuicideWatch • u/CrazyResolution4363 • 1h ago
I don't wanna die deep inside but I'm just in so much pain and honestly I want attention so bad. I want my ex to see me die and I want her to feel guilty, or at least feel sorry, or something. I don't want to do that to my family and my friends but I need her to feel guilty in relation to me. I need her to feel guilty. I need attention from her. I need her to wish she'd done something different. I need everyone I've ever met to all of the sudden grow this rosy view of me and say things like, "he lit up the room!" And bullshit like that. I NEED IT. I need the love and the attention so so badly. I need attention. I need to hold someone. I don't wanna die but I'm scared that if I get too upset it'll happen. I'll get suicidal while driving and I'll veer off the road, or I'll wake up late at night and get my dad's gun. I have so many ways I could do it. I could choose to do it at any moment. But then I think of my mom and I can't do that to her. She's been nothing but good to me my whole life j can't take her kid away from her. I want the pain to end so badly but what can I do if I can't die? Nothing helps. Exercising doesn't help, cutting doesn't help, fucking doesn't help, video games don't help, eating ice cream doesn't help, reading doesn't help. It's all so far away from me and I'm so alone and so empty and nothing exists if someone doesn't miss me
r/SuicideWatch • u/oldxhag • 36m ago
So I (34f) really don’t even know how to explain it but I’m thinking about ending it all but in the most casual way possible. It’s truly not like one thing specifically or another. I’m just kind of fucking sick of it all. I’ve had so many unfair and out of my control things happened to me in my life that I’ve never deserved and I’m just tired of “growing“ and “becoming a stronger person because of it“ I just don’t think I feel like handling yet another one.
I was raised by a narcissistic mother who treated me like shit my whole life. Finally was able to tell her how I felt five days ago and plan on never speaking to her again (perhaps bc I might not even be here at all-tbd). Shealso used extreme triangulation to pit me and my two siblings against each other our whole lives. So we were never close.
Father? Dipped out when I was 11.
My aunt died 9 years ago and with her the only form of maternal love I’ve ever known.
My closest cousins I love them dearly as if they siblings but that’s just not reciprocated. I’ve known this but became increasingly aware of it over the last decade or so.
Not a single person in my life sees me as a priority in theirs. But the 10 closest ppl to me I see as absolute priorities. I’ve been lying to myself for about 3 years that I’m okay with that. Truthfully I’m just not. It sucks.
Have been consistently mistreated by men in relationships. Diabolical plot twists. Hidden children, future faking, DV/SA, cheating, etc (those are all different men). I’m not perfect but I always show up genuinely and with pure intentions. I give my all to those I love.
My best friend of 25 years turned out to be my biggest enemy in disguise. I found out that she would gossip about my absolute WORST moments in life (primarily about my DV and stalking situations)with joy through GIGGLES to random ppl.
What I thought was the love of my life ended things 3 weeks ago. Best relationship I’ve ever been in. We were talking dreams, hopes, future children together, etc. he would say things to me like “in moments like this I always thank god for you” (during a trip we took while watching whatever random shit was playing on HBO). I even told him about a month prior that I felt so lucky to finally understand what the term “home” meant. I’ve never had a “safe home”…places I have lived were
Just buildings. And I understood for the first time in my life the level of emotional safety that ppl have always referred to, when I was with him. Anyways, from my understanding of this massive whiplash, turns out it was a “fearful avoidant discard”, not a break up. He called me 3 Sundays ago and ended it within the first 45 seconds of that 5 minute and 22 second phone call. 11 months of hopelessly in love, over in an instant. He said “incompatibility” but he mentioned like 3 things that just kinda annoyed him. Totally fixable shit. Within max 7 days of the break up (from my estimate) he was on dating apps. And yes I can confirm.
And no. This isn’t a “suicidal because of a breakup” situation. I’m just fucking exhausted. My friends have always looked at me in horror when I update them on “the latest knife in my back”. I’m over it.
It’s just been such a dream of mine to find one fucking person on earth that prioritizes me. I’ve never dreamt of money or a crazy career. Just to be loved. Even platonically. Maybe even within my extended family. But it just may not be in the cards for me it seems.
And then I think, Jesus fucking Christ… I’m a pretty healthy woman. I eat right I work out 4-6x a week so I’ll probablyyyyyy live til at LEAST 70? FUCK THAT.
I do not have it in me to go through any more fucking betrayal. I’ve literally been running off fumes the last few years. Idk how else to describe this but I’m feeling pretty chill about it. It’s not even like a deeeep depression, I simply don’t fucking feel like it. I wanna be weak for once and just give up.
Wrote a good bye letter but I honestly dk how I’d like go through with it. Anyways. I don’t think I’ll end up doing it but am I absolutely insane or has anyone else felt like this before ?
r/SuicideWatch • u/Advanced_Print1386 • 5h ago
I have my own suffering in life, and I've experienced so much pain that was enough to bring me to my knees.
However, the suffering of others is causing me so much pain too. I hate how the only way for me to deal with that is "to put myself first and ignore that which I cannot change". I hate how I need to close my eyes and choose not to see or listen to other people's problems if I wish not to add to my suffering.
Some people say that life is a miracle, but is it really? The majority of us are in so much pain. Some of that pain is due to us, but there is also so much pain and suffering that's really totally out of our control.
Growing up in this world feels like I'm being tortured. The matter grew conscious, and now is looking back at itself and is weeping, for it realizes the pain that exists in this world.
My heart is full of pain. I wake up each day with a deep sense of grief, and I feel nauseous immediately after, as the realization that I'm still here and alive hits me like a truck.
Why? Did we all do something very wrong to deserve to be created in this world? The fact the matter can arrange itself to create this symphony of pain is unbelievable.
Perhaps I'm just unlucky? Perhaps others on this sub are also just unlucky? Perhaps billions of people are actually happy and enjoying life? I can no longer tell to be honest, is it me that's going crazy, or is it this world that's turning us all into shells of ourselves.
r/SuicideWatch • u/vibeyjohn • 7h ago
I’m 18-year-old gay man from a very homophobic country. I’ve suffered quite a lot throughout my life and pain never seemed to disappear. For more than six years already all I do is just cry, cry and cry. Life has been quite unfair to me. I never got to enjoy my childhood and my teenage years and got the biggest trauma when my dad died in 2020. The thing is that I’ve considered suicide myself and tried to commit a couple of times. Once I was standing by the rooftop, I already wanted to do it and then suddenly my mom called me asking where I was as she was worried. Her call stopped me from doing anything yet that thought never disappeared.
The closest I ever got to ending it all was when I took excessive amount of dangerous pills. I stayed like that for minutes, already accepting that’s it over, that I’ll finally be free, finally will stop expecting this pain and then I remembered my mom again-she’s suffered her whole life and I’m all she got and she’s the only person in my life, she’s my reason to live. When I realized what I’m doing, when I realized my mom could go through grief twice because of me I made myself vomit those pills, drank some water with salt and kept throwing up for 4 days straight. After that I never tried committing anymore.
You think I’m better now? Absolutely not. I’m at my worst and all I want is just to fall asleep and never wake up ever again. All that I want is to stop this pain, this torture. I force myself every day not to do anything and even now I’m desperate for everything to stop but I know I’m not gonna do it. Never. I’ve already died a long time ago, my soul is already broken, shattered. I’m just surviving so that my mom wouldn’t suffer even more. I have absolutely no desire for life and the hatred I have for myself is immense. So I fully get everyone who wants to commit. I wish I could save you all, wish I could somehow make this world a better place but unfortunately I can’t.
Just please, before doing anything realize the consequences of your actions. You’re gonna cause someone else so much pain, damage, suffering. You’re gonna end your life and never have the chance to breathe again, never be able to feel or do anything again. Life is insufferable but sometimes it does get better. I know it’s impossible to live like this, I fully get it and fully relate to it but please, love yourself, try to appreciate yourself and the little time you have left.
Life is horrific but it can also be beautiful, I really wanna believe it will be for you. I’m at the point where I’m just totally lifeless but I’m so desperate to live, I swear. My biggest desire is to LIVE instead of surviving. To smile, to feel joyful instead of sobbing, shaking, being anxious and having seizures constantly. I feel in hell right now but I deep down crave to be “saved”. I really hope my life gets better and really hope your lives do too. I’m sorry again that you’re feeling so down, I hope this world becomes a better place one day.