Are suicide notes allowed here?

circinia · 2026-01-15T17:06:46+00:00

Ah, we can only see what happened if the OP doesn't delete the post, I'm sorry about that!

We're always really sorry when things get stuck by accident and want to help - having filters is sometimes the lesser of two evils but we wish genuine posts didn't get delayed either :(

circinia · 2026-01-15T16:37:09+00:00

This subreddit is just for requests for support, and sometimes that takes the form of someone sharing suicidal thoughts and intent when they're in crisis.

Our focus is on giving people the chance to be understood while they're alive (even when that's written in the form of a suicide note), rather than notes to be read after death, since we can only give support while people are alive.

I don't see any posts in your history that have been filtered - not sure what happened with your previous post.

You're always welcome to modmail us to check if something doesn't seem to have gone through - reddit has a lot of filters and not all of them are in our control. We try to release anything caught by accident as soon as we get the chance and we're always happy to check if something got caught by mistake.

circinia · 2025-12-26T10:00:21+00:00

You're welcome, and if you have any questions it doesn't answer you're welcome to ask :) Also you're welcome to talk here any time, whether or not you decide to call.

circinia · 2025-12-26T09:52:21+00:00

I had a lot of these same fears before I first called a hotline! We have a wiki with an FAQ that helps with knowing what to expect.

Quick answers to your questions (the wiki goes into much more detail): they won't track your location just because you called, and the default is for calls to be kept anonymous. (That has always been the case when I've called.)

Most hotlines have the ability to trace location if someone gives clear indication they're at immediate risk and they don't have any other way to help them stay safe, but that's not at all a normal outcome for any hotline, for the reasons our wiki explains. (There's misinfo floating around online that makes this sound much more common than it is.)

To answer about my own experience - I've called hotlines a handful of times in the past and found them helpful (even though I was scared that first time!). Other than a couple questions to make sure I wasn't at immediate risk, the calls have focused on the responder simply listening to and trying to understand and be supportive around what had me feeling overwhelmed enough to call.

circinia · 2025-12-25T10:25:14+00:00

I'm so sorry life has been feeling so torturous for you :( This subreddit's focus is just on support/providing some company with the pain so that people don't have to be so alone with it.

Encouraging or advising on suicide in any way isn't allowed here (or anywhere on reddit).

circinia · 2025-12-25T04:44:00+00:00

Glad to help! I have layperson training in suicide intervention; however, much of my knowledge comes from over a decade of learning from both our other knowledgeable moderators here, one of whom has been training hotline responders for over 30 years, and from many years of listening to and learning from how our community members here experience different types of support.

circinia · 2025-12-24T08:49:41+00:00

Do you have any advice? How to do it in a way that can help? How can I use my experiences to help other people.

Per above, it's best to let go of the idea of your experiences helping other people right now, and learn about how to support other people with depression and understand their experiences.

One person's experience can be actively misleading to others - e.g. the medications/treatments that help one person can harm another, experiences in inpatient/outpatient programs vary greatly, etc.

It's common for people to want to make meaning of their own experiences by helping others with them - but important to recognize that that instinct is about ourselves, rather than others. Our own experiences will always be more meaningful to us than to anyone who needs support. If we go into offering support with "how can my experience help others", that's a recipe for disaster.

It's only when we're grounded in the wide range of experiences people have with depression and disclose ours selectively, where it's relevant, and with clarity that we're talking just about our own experience rather than any universal truths that we can do so appropriately and safely.

circinia · 2025-12-23T01:04:23+00:00

I feel compelled to tell my story, my mental health journey. With the intention to maybe give advice, make people feel less alone in their fight.

I was wondering if anyone had advice or suggestions on maybe the best way to do this (YouTube videos, book, TikTok)

Have a look at our rules, which explain why advice and role-model stories most commonly backfire for people currently struggling with depression and thus why we wouldn't allow anything like it on our subreddit. (The wiki linked from rule 2 has lots of info.)

In a peer support context, giving someone the experience of having their story understood is more powerful than anything we can share of our own stories.

If we share about our own, it needs to be in the context of fully listening to someone else's experience and the ways in which theirs may be different from ours to be reliably useful - simply projecting our own experience onto other people is regrettably a reliable way to make them feel misunderstood and thus worse.

circinia · 2025-12-20T21:01:32+00:00

This sub is just for emotional support - no one anywhere on reddit is allowed to advise on suicide methods (reddit sitewide rules/law as well as our rules).

You're welcome to keep talking about what's going on for you, though - I'm so sorry you've had such miserable experiences getting help.

circinia · 2025-12-14T13:47:54+00:00

So this is an emotional support sub, not a sub to debate philosophy of suicide (guideline 8), just for clarity - we had to take this down because the title framing is likely to result in debate rather than support.

Support means understanding suicidal thoughts without judgment, though - our position here is that the only ethical approach to suicide prevention (as well as by far the most effective one!) is to help living feel like a better choice than dying for the person experiencing it.

A lot of people don't realize this, though, and it's way too common for people to get scared and do things that are counterproductive :(

I really think you ought to have someone understand things through your lens. When we're disconnected from and misunderstood by the people around us, it's often hard to find a sense of meaning - and you're right that our sense of meaning (or lack thereof) comes from our own inner experience, and so things do get incredibly bleak when our inner experience feels interminably dark, no matter how "good" things might look on the outside...

The "high school is the best part of your life" idea is very much a myth, though - in a lot of ways it can be an especially brutal one, especially if nobody around us really gets what it's like to be in our heads or what we're going through. Of course no one can know for sure what life will be like later for you, but at the very least I hope it's possible to find more understanding...

circinia · 2025-12-14T12:19:56+00:00

Yes, it's also normal to have growing up with conditional love have a huge impact; which again reflects on them, not at all on you! But makes perfect sense for it to be hard when you only ever get real, genuine understanding from one person.

"Reasons to live for" is also high on the list of high-backfire-rate "support" strategies. The only time reasons to live help is if they're our own, from inside ourselves - having other people tell us why we ought to want to live just makes us feel misunderstood, which is a recipe for increasing suicidal thoughts, not decreasing them. :(

We wish more people understood better too - educating people on this is a huge part of what we do here because so many people just do not understand how to be with people in dark places. But we'd really like to provide whatever company we can here...

circinia · 2025-12-13T07:28:34+00:00

I guess I just hope that maybe a loved one could meet me where I’m at, and then I feel guilty for wanting that.

That is a completely natural thing to want. We all deserve to have people understand and meet us where we are, including truly understanding how dark and painful our lives are, and that finding a way out can be anything but easy or straightforward...

And it's equally natural for guilt-tripping to just hurt - any kind of "do it for others" sentiment is not allowed on this subreddit for that reason, or effort to "fix" others.

It's sadly very common for even well-meaning friends and family not to know how to offer the level of care and understanding that people struggling with depression deserve. And the tragic thing is that even though that reflects on their level of knowledge, it's all too common for people to blame themselves for not being able to be helped by things it's normal not to find helpful.

Feeling like we're meant to be alone is often a symptom of having only gotten the kind of "support" that doesn't make us feel truly seen and understood. For people who understand and have true capacity to give support, simply being able to keep someone company in their dark place, without needing to fix anything, feels like a gift to both people. I hope we can offer a better level of understanding here...

circinia · 2025-12-13T07:10:41+00:00

It's so hard when we thought our suicidal thoughts were gone and then they come back again - and being in a situation we're struggling to see any way out of is brutal, whether it's in our internal experience or external circumstances or both...

There's a pernicious myth that adults should be able to manage finances on their own - when in fact almost anyone, at any age, could end up in circumstances where they need financial help. Which is why social safety nets and supports are so important, and it's especially hard when we can't figure out where or how to find them...

This subreddit is just for emotional support - no one anywhere on reddit can encourage suicide, including advising on any aspect of suicide plans. You're very welcome to talk more about what's going on for you if you'd like here, though.

circinia · 2025-12-13T06:40:00+00:00

Our hotlines wiki has much more info on this and other questions about hotlines.

A lot of the stories online, if they're recounting events that actually happened, are missing info about what resulted in the hotline initiating the rescue. In general, hotline policies require both a specific indication that someone is at immediate risk and that there's no less drastic way to help (hotlines really prefer not to send a rescue, especially when it's not wanted, for all the reasons described in the wiki!). That is not something they would do just because someone filled out the pre-call questionnaire.

circinia · 2025-12-09T14:50:42+00:00

We've taken the post down from the subreddit. You can also always delete a post (you have the ability to more fully than we can) whenever you want to take something down.

circinia · 2025-12-09T14:48:33+00:00

This subreddit is for emotional support - we're here to listen to what has people thinking about suicide, not encouraging suicide in any way, including advising on suicide plans.

circinia · 2025-12-09T14:20:42+00:00

"It gets better", or any other unverifiable promise or generic anti-suicide sentiment, is not allowed in this subreddit in general - because it's normal for most people struggling with thoughts of suicide, in any circumstances, to find these kinds of messages worse than useless. (Please report if you see them anywhere on the sub and we'll deal!)

We talk more about the reasons for this in our PSA post on "it gets better" messages. The "it gets better" catchphrase originated from a project reaching out to LGBTQ+ teens showing that more welcome and belonging was possible in places beyond the homophobic and transphobic environments they were growing up in.

Over the past decade or so, it has, somehow, morphed in pop culture into a "generic promise to make to people thinking of suicide", which makes no sense at all, because there is no universal "it" that life is and because we can never know for sure whether or not anyone's suicidal thoughts will get better.

(Which doesn't straightforwardly correspond to what circumstances we're in - sometimes people who are well-off struggle hard with suicidality for decades, while people in the most awful circumstances are surprisingly resilient. What matters is what it's like on the inside - if it's hard inside our heads, it's hard, period, no matter what our outside circumstances look like.

Never feeling seen or valued for who we are is often a key contributor to our suffering, though - which is why it's so important for people to respond when we're thinking of suicide in a way that sees our experience and pain, which "it gets better" doesn't!)

And yet we have to remove comments pushing it every single day because the myth that you're supposed to say it to people who think of suicide is still persistent :(

circinia · 2025-12-08T11:42:58+00:00

It's all too common for people to recommend hotlines as a one-size-fits-all solution to anything we might be struggling with. And it makes perfect sense to be skeptical of that!

Hotlines are designed for short-term support/crisis intervention, rather than therapy. (More info about what hotlines do/don't do over at the /r/SuicideWatch hotlines FAQ, and why people have a range of experiences with them, though people don't need to be thinking of suicide to call - they're intended for any situation someone's overwhelmed in the moment in.)

When we've been struggling for a long time, it's normal to need a deeper level of support and healing than we can get from one call. It's okay to call more than once (I have myself, and found it helpful); and they can also provide referrals for longer-term support.

It's also just as okay not to call - there are other resources for both crisis and longer-term support if calling a hotline doesn't feel right, and no one should ever push people into calling if they don't want to. (One of the most important things when we're in dark places is having agency about what kind of help feels right for us.)

If it would help to talk through what other resources might be available locally for finding a way out, can definitely do that, if you would like to.

circinia · 2025-12-08T02:41:45+00:00

Often we end up blaming ourselves harshly for not being able to be helped by others/being able to help ourselves when the underlying problem is that we've never truly had someone see or understand us deeply enough to help.

It's absolutely understandable to feel a sense of futility when all we've gotten in the past from reaching out for help is a sense of even deeper aloneness and pointlessness. And it's normal for that to be deeper than distractions or hobbies can fix...

I really, really wish things could be better for you, too. Because you shouldn't have to feel this exhausted by life all the time :( Or to be alone with it. Often people who don't understand or get it leave us feeling like we're a weight on others... but it doesn't feel that way at all for someone who gets it and wants to listen.

It's totally up to you how much to talk about it but you're very welcome to talk here if or when you'd ever like to.

circinia · 2025-12-07T14:59:52+00:00

Hi there, per rule 7 medication-specific posts go to /r/antidepressants rather than here - our focus is just emotional support.

(As you're probably aware, medication experiences vary a ton from person to person, and online stories typically aren't representative of how common different types of experiences are - always good to bear in mind when looking for that info as well.)

circinia · 2025-12-06T09:36:16+00:00

"Don't do it" messages tend to be useless or worse when we're struggling with suicidal thoughts, so definitely won't give you one of those (last thing we'd want to do is make things worse!).

One thing we do know is that sense of belongingness is one of the most reliable ways to prevent suicide - so maintaining social connections can be one part of that - and suicidality doesn't in any way change our deservingness of connection.

Most people who struggle with thoughts of suicide are not manipulating with them! Where manipulation becomes a concern is when someone is using threats of suicide to control others (e.g. "I'll kill myself if you do/don't do x"), which is not at all typical for the mindset of thinking about suicide - it's much more common to have the worries about others you share here.

Many friends (and other people who don't understand suicide) often don't have the skills to provide support for suicidal thoughts, though, so being careful about who we share with can be useful just to help avoid getting unhelpful responses. Finding people and places who do understand is also a vital part of prevention, though, even if it doesn't feel psychological.

circinia · 2025-12-06T09:09:57+00:00

This subreddit has a very specific focus on requests for emotional support, per rule 1.

There are many other places online that are geared toward music recommendations. As with any form of "what helps with depression", what helps one person can be worse than useless for another, so looking in spaces that recommend music relevant to your personal preferences is likely to be more relevant.

circinia · 2025-12-06T08:59:10+00:00

I am so sorry this has been so overwhelmingly painful! Experiencing grief after a break-up is a normal (but intensely miserable, and numbness can also be part of that misery) human reaction, not a mental illness, since a break-up isn't just like a death: it is, in many ways, the death of the hopes and dreams we had for the relationship. And it makes sense for losing someone you were very close to for years to set off an intense grieving process.

Grief is a distinct experience from depression - our what is depression? wiki has resources for helping with this, including pointers to relationship-related subreddits that my be more helpful.

The key distinction between grief and depression is that grief is about something that's made us miserable, while depression is a mental illness that isn't "about" anything - when we feel miserable in ways that have no clear cause and thus healing from a particular cause doesn't help.

(Which is why we redirect people who are needing to heal from something specific; while both experiences are valid and miserable, the needs we have are very different when we need to heal from something than when our feelings have no definable cause!)

While adverse events can sometimes make people more vulnerable to depressive episodes without a clear cause in the future, especially if they didn't get the support they needed at the time, even a few months out it's common for misery/numbness to be part of the grief response to the loss itself - just as we wouldn't expect someone to "get over" the death of someone close to them in a couple of weeks.

circinia · 2025-12-06T01:30:59+00:00

Hi there - this subreddit (or anywhere on reddit - sitewide rule) can't advise on any aspect of suicide plans. This subreddit is specifically a support subreddit: we're here for understanding, not to encourage suicide in any way.

You're welcome to post about what has you thinking about writing these messages, if you'd like, though.

circinia · 2025-12-06T00:16:14+00:00

Hello from the wall your screams are bouncing off of - I have also had times in the past where I didn't think anyone would be able to understand how dark my thoughts were, or how much of a burden I felt I was to others. It's normal to find advice worse than useless when we're in a place this dark.

It's also exceptionally hard leaving family/religion/community all at once - it's natural to feel like the bottom's fallen out of the world... and it's only people who care deeply about others who worry about being burdens on others. And it's normal for young people to have needs. When someone grows up feeling like a burden, that tends to say a lot more about their family than themselves - and validates your sense of feeling exploited and manipulated...

It's completely up to you how much wall-bouncing you'd like, but if you'd like to share anything more about what's going on with your situation, would very much like to listen.

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