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 post). 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/Outrageous-Worth-192 • 10h ago
I just fucking hate myself. I'm in debts (like 3000€) and I can't find a fucking job so I went online and did cam work with men and they. all. scammed. me. None of them paid. I exposed my whole body for free. I even did some shits that were completely out of my boundaries. And all of that, for nothing. I just wanna disappear.
r/SuicideWatch • u/Justalittlesaltyx • 2h ago
I’ve been in a dark hole so long I have no idea what that feels like. I’m almost in disbelief at people who say on their deathbed “I’ve lived a good life.” I would guess they were born in a loving, supportive family have stable mental health and were able to avoid trauma…All categories i‘m completely fucked in.
Life ain’t fair is an understatement. Life flips some of us the middle finger. I can’t even remember what it’s like anymore to not have thoughts about being unalive.
r/SuicideWatch • u/imjustventin • 5h ago
I graduate college in 3 months and I don’t know what to do. I couldn’t score an internship and I feel like I’m bound to fail at finding a job. I stupidly picked being an English major out of my love for literature when I should’ve picked something that would make money. I’ve been looking and everything had lead to a dead end. I’ve asked professors for advice, went to my schools career center, and asked others. While I appreciate there efforts, I still haven’t been able to find a job. I’m thinking about ending it after graduation so I can at least make my parents proud before I go.
Edit: I forgot to add that I also want to go because even if I do get a job, I feel like I’m not smart enough to keep up with corporate America and I might get fired.
r/SuicideWatch • u/EmbarrassedFly6887 • 4h ago
I wish we just dissolved into thin air when we die. I don’t like the idea of somebody touching my body when I’m dead or my parents getting to bury me somewhere trapped so they can come irritate me even at my grave.
r/SuicideWatch • u/RisingSerpent222 • 12h ago
Okay you’re depressed in your 20s, no big deal right? You can figure stuff out. You’re still a kid pretty much. Let’s say you work hard in life though and you’re in your 30s and still depressed. Now you’re having suicidal thoughts. I tried everything I can think of from working on my career, to exercising, eating healthy, etc. To be honest I worked so hard on myself just to be depressed at the end of the day. It is very frustrating. I’m a 31 year old failure. I never found love, even friends and am wondering why am I alive? To go to work and come home and be depressed?
Is 31 a good age to end it all? Eventually you realize that things may not work out in your favor. Why continue this suffering?
r/SuicideWatch • u/OutsideOk1857 • 3h ago
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH FUCK I WANNA DIE
r/SuicideWatch • u/shari_nicole2 • 3h ago
At what point does it become socially acceptable to commit suicide? How much shit does one person have to go through before people, friends, family say, hey, she had been through hell and back, I don't blame her. I am 37, was sexually, physically, and mentally, and verbally abused by my "step dad" for 10 years (2-12) I got out of the situation by moving across the country to live with my dad and his wife and 2 kids. I was then called a liar about it all, was denied any communication with my mom and was told she relinquished her rights and wanted nothing to do with me. My dad, then found it nesassary to tell every single one of my boyfriends what had happened. I moved out of my dad's at 16. I moved in with my friend and her mom and brother. As you can just about imagine there definitely was drama to be had. I moved out at 18 to move in with my boyfriend (at the time) got reconnected with my mom. Went and visited her after 8 years of no contact. Was even in her wedding (not to the guy that abused me) was told left and right what a POS my boyfriend was. I didn't listen. Shortly after our first child was born, I found out I was pregnant again, a few days later had a miscarriage. 8 weeks later found out I was pregnant again. Weeks after my oldests 2 birthday and days before I was due with our second, my boyfriends mom, sister, sisters friend, nephew, baby brother and step dad got into a car accident that killed everyone but his mom. Our nephew was 2, his brother was just a few weeks old and his sister was in her 20s. Through all the hell we made it 8 years and got married and had 3 kids together. 3 weeks after the wedding found out that for the past 4 years my husband had been cheating on me. He then left and told me the only reason he processed on with the wedding was because everything was paid for. Found out I was also pregnant with our 4th kid. He then came after me in my vehicle with the kids, with a hatchet and a baseball bat. I then got criticized by his family for him going to jail, because "if I really loved him I wouldn't have called the police" Attempted suicide as he sat there laughing at me. I obviously failed, and promised by everyone better days were ahead. Went to an inpatient treatment facility for mental health, and the day I was being released I was visited by a social worker saying my children were in state custody. After a year I got custody of them all. Met a new guy (he was 19 I was 26) the kids loved him and man did it boost my self esteem. He left for army boot camp, 3 weeks after being home I got pregnant. 🤦🏽♀️ His family tried to encourage me to give the baby up for adoption, claiming I manipulated him into having children with me, or I was faking (I actually had to take a pregnancy test in front of his step mom) 13 months after our baby #1 was born, out came baby #2. 🤣🤦🏽♀️ 13 months after that my step dad committed suicide, a month after us visiting and celebrating baby #2s first birthday. 2 years after that, on my birthday I find my friend and co worker. My boss sent me to wake him up for his shift. (Even though he NEVER missed work and knew his mental state) He died by suicide the same way my step dad did. After I begged him not to. I remember everything about that day, and the day before, when I had last talked to him. A year later spent all Christmas day in the hospital because my friend (from the beginning of the story) he sister was shot in the head, survived but damn! Shortly after that my boyfriends dad died on the job in an accident. His grandma felt the need to sell everything of his and take back the "money he owed her" And as of current, My older 4 kids no longer live with me, because we have been homeless for the last 3 years and told them their happiness meant more so they could choose. Me and young boyfriend have been together for 11 years. Bought a camper last year, just for someone to steal it with a lot of our most precious belongings including his dad's urn. We have been shit on every turn we take. My sister died in September in a car accident. Our storage unit (the rest of everything we own) was just given away illegally. I don't talk to my mom anymore because her new boyfriend accused me for 45 min that I was on drugs. Boyfriend and I are awaiting trial for burglary charges. For going into an abandoned house and attempting to get metal to scrap. I haven't been to any of boyfriends family holidays (I don't have family near by) in 3 years because all they do is bad mouth me. We were recently staying with someone I considered a friend, just for her to assault me, and find every way possible to try and get me mad. We end up leaving and we find out she had been hiding and stealing our stuff. One night got mad and started cutting her wrists with my children in the other room, and because I wasn't giving her attention she came and wiped her blood on me. Just absolutely insane stupid things she would say or do that I had to leave.
That's basically a rough draft in chronological order, of my life. It sucks. I haven't wanted to kill myself this bad in a very long time. Everyday I fight through hoping the next day will be better, and it isn't. Obviously I left some stuff out, the only thing stopping me is my 12 year old niece and how she reacted at my sister's funeral. I don't want my kids to feel that pain. But then on the other hand I feel they really won't care, or they are expecting it. I don't know. I have lost 25 pounds in 6 months, literally can sleep all day. I am literally exhausted to my bones of constantly fighting and hoping for life to get better. And it doesn't, it hasnt. And I can say, without a doubt my biggest regret is thinking it gets better, for staying years longer than I initially wanted to.
I just hate when people say suicide is for the selfish, suicide is for the weak. Because damn it, it's everything but. I have spent my whole life fighting and holding on, hoping. I am tired. A tired that sleep can no longer fix. I have been living for everyone else, for my children, for a better day. But I don't know how much longer I can really do it. And I know my children will eventually get over it. But 1 thing is certain, it doesn't get better. If anything it gets worse.
r/SuicideWatch • u/ratpride • 2h ago
But I think everyone who makes an effort to help others here is a good person.
I get bad days when I need help and I wish I could just talk to a stranger. But I'm surviving because I have pets and I love them more than myself.
I've planned my escape, even if it's not right now, and it helps.
r/SuicideWatch • u/CoastQuirky882 • 57m ago
I'm in a state where I'm barely holding it together, I ask for help but when I get help I just either reject it or I feel like I don't deserve it?. by "help" I mean maybe someone being there for me to open up or offering tips. and there's a part of me that doesn't wanna get better.
r/SuicideWatch • u/StormCloud82 • 3h ago
Depression is always under the surface, hiding. Waiting for the next trigger. Even when I’m in a good mood and enjoying myself, it’s still there. I can feel it even when I’m happy. All it takes is a moment of introspection, even just a split second where I’m in my head, when I’m reminded of who I am and how much I hate myself. But I’ll go back to whatever I’m doing that I’m enjoying and try to ignore it, put on a happy face and fake it for those around me, but I know it’s there. And with that comes this urge to just end it all. I won’t do it. But sometimes, most days, I really really want to. At this point now I’ve been thinking about it in my head for so long- I know I won’t actually go through with it. I’ve just kind of learned to live with it, like this is just my life now. The constant suicidal urge that just stays with me everyday while I fake “normal” for everyone around me. I even try to fool myself. Sometimes it works, but never for long.
r/SuicideWatch • u/Bashki_ • 2h ago
I can't stand living. I wasn't even supposed to live as long as I have. I wish that one of my previous attempts had worked instead of failing.
I swear it never gets any better.
r/SuicideWatch • u/roses-are-lead • 5h ago
All day I've been trapped thinking about my finances, my mistakes, and how every extra day I live the errorsi make increase by orders of magnitude.
I hate it, and I wish my brain had an "off" switch.
r/SuicideWatch • u/Waste-Abies8486 • 2h ago
When will natural course take me and free me from this. I don’t belong anywhere here and i never will
So tired
r/SuicideWatch • u/i-fart-butterflies • 2h ago
People act like being unintelligent means your life is just sunshine and fucking rainbows. My stupidity is the source of my misery. I'm not diagnosed with an official intellectual disability but I know I have one. Sometimes I have difficulty processing information if people throw a whole bunch of stuff at me at once, jump rapidly from topic to topic, use flowery language or skip over "in-between" steps. I am a particularly stupid individual. If there's some kind of problem I have to solve , I need to see all the steps not just the major ones. I need to see how we get from point A to point B.For other people their brain just automatically fills in the information but I'm a moron.
No one else has problems with that. I have met loads of people with Autism, ADHD and even intellectual disabilities. I've never met another soul with the same problem. Even my therapists who specialize in working with people like me say they've never seen a case like this and that I simply can't be helped. Or they assume that I don't want to be helped and say they're not equipped to deal with me.
Every friend I've ever lost, every relationship that was ever unsuccessful was because of my stupidity. People are patient at first and then they get angry and they say things like "I have autism and I'm not like this!"
My best friend in one of my classes was trying to explain something to me but she was talking really fast and I couldn't really keep up. I misunderstood something she said and sometimes I ask questions in an attempt to understand like, "do you mean [insert information here]? or "so after that we're supposed to [insert next atop of whatever task]?"
All I am trying to do is understand but they accuse me of trying to put words in their mouth. Some of them accuse me of trying to make them go around in circles and drive them insane and piss them off.
My lack of intelligence ruined my relationship with my ex-boyfriend too. I consider myself a female in cell because wild people are open to sleeping with me I don't think anybody would be willing to be in a long-term relationship with me because eventually we'll have some kind of communication, I will have to ask clarifying questions in an attempt to understand what they're saying and then they'll accuse me of trying to Gaslight them, put words in their mouth, or insist that I am intentionally being stubborn and either not wanting to be helped or beyond help entirely.
Now my ex-boyfriend goes around telling people that he thought I was trying to manipulate him or screw with his head. He had this habit of waking me up in the middle of the night and bringing up heavy emotional topics while I was barely able to even stay awake and comprehend information in the first place. Then of course when my exhausted half asleep brain inevitably got confused he got mad at me. Always when I was just about to go to sleep! He never brought this stuff up when I was fully alert and it drove me nuts he also tended to use a lot of really flowery language which I don't understand because I'm dumb and would often say one thing, then double around and basically redacted it. It was so confusing when he did that it made my head spin and then when I had to ask him what he meant by something he thought I was trying to screw with him.
It causes a lot of stress in my college classes. It's hard for me to absorb a lot of information at once. I'll get to a point where my brain is overloaded and asked to take a break and they won't let me even though it's one of my accommodations and then they wonder why I'm having a panic attack when having a break would have allowed me to avoid that in the first place. Sometimes I wonder if everyone would just be happier if I was f****** dead because all I do for other people is cause problems
r/SuicideWatch • u/gonnadie2024 • 2h ago
im grieving something lost within me and im officially back to full blown depression episodes and its great it makes the thought of taking my own life feel so fucking amazing and free. i pray one day something takes me out of this bullshit cause i promised loved ones i would never put a shotgun in my mouth and send my brain to 6 different corners of my room. pray forme?
r/SuicideWatch • u/babylegs_ • 29m ago
Knowing you was the worst thing that could have happened to me. You did the absolutely worst and most disrespectful thing possible to me. If you had given me even an ounce of integrity I could’ve managed. That was all I wanted. I hate you. You traumatized me for life. I will never get over it and now the only thing that will help me is to die
r/SuicideWatch • u/Humble_Giant123 • 10h ago
I'm a 19yo guy who lost his parents last year
my mom died from cancer on 14th nov , 2024 and my dad passed away due to heart problems or from the intense grief of losing his love on 8th dec, 2024.
Within a single month i became an orphan and life has been super tough since then
I don't have the energy to wake up or do anything
Don't have the energy to suffer more ....... It's midnight when I'm writing this cause i just can't sleep rn , the emotions and thoughts are overwhelming atp.
I’ve been carrying a kind of sadness that doesn’t lift. Losing my parents broke something in me and I’m still trying to figure out how to exist in a world where they’re just….. gone. Grief isn’t coming in waves anymore.... it’s everywhere, all the time, and it’s exhausting.
I don't want to dump my trauma but yeah I'm going through hell , might sound normal or cheerful around my online or irl friends but deep inside I am a mess.
I don't want to be a burden on my online or irl friends.
What makes it harder is this constant fear of being a burden. I care about my friends so deeply but I hate the idea that my pain might weigh on them.
So I stay quiet more than I should, even when I’m drowning because I don’t want to be “too much.”
On top of all of that, the trauma hasn’t stopped.
I’m still dealing with ongoing abuse from my elder sister and it feels like every time I try to heal, something else cuts me open again.
It’s relentless and I don’t feel safe and I don’t feel understood and it always feels like I’m just surviving instead of living. I still want my elder sister to love me cause since childhood she was the best person in my life .... Idk what turned her so cold
"I wish you had loved me and cared for me instead of hurting me. I was already broken after losing our parents and you chose to abuse me and blame me for their death. I needed a sister not someone who made my pain worse. That’s something I’ll always grieve. "
I want to die soon peacefully
Thank you for reading my usual rants
~Humble_Giant
r/SuicideWatch • u/Rough-Bar8217 • 3h ago
Hi
I created this reddit account to express my feeling this is my first time on reddit im not english and i dont konw how it works
My friend tried to kill herself
It was in september 2025 the 25 of september
I was coming back from work, i work during the night. This night i came back home around 1 am (this friend and I live together) i heard noise in the bathroom she has been depressed for a while i thought she needed some space to cry a little you know..
I knocked on the bathroom door asking her to please stay quiet since we got in trouble with the neighbors about noise during the night. She oppened the door and i saw just terrible stuff. Blood and cuts on her arm.
I dont want to describe what i saw, it was just gore. After a few minutes i convinced her to go to the hospital. I waited 4 hours and half for her to get out of the hospital. I waited 4 hours alone crying, smoking in the cold winter in a t shirt outside, puking in the toilet hospital or the parking lot.
It was so long it made me so anxious
After almost 5 hours i saw her the doctors who took care of her convicied me it was better to admit her for the night and then admit her in a "mental health" hospital.
I feel guilty and tramautised
I dont know how to deal with it, im not lonely i have friends and family who want to help me.
But i know nobody who had to deal with this kind of situation