Internet advice forums can be a lifeline, but there are always exceptions. This week, the regulator Ofcom announced it is investigating a longstanding pro-suicide internet forum with more than 40,000 members. It has been officially linked to 50 deaths in the UK alone.
BBC reports don’t name the site for fear of directing people there, but I found it anyway. And it is roughly as you might expect: namely, every loving parent’s nightmare. Instead of swapping relationship anecdotes or cookery tips, members pour out their pain, discuss the pros and cons of various approaches to death in great depth, and affirm each other in the desire to die. Many users are obviously young. Biographies under made-up names say things like “Autistic and heartbroken”, “Trapped in the suffering”, and “Eating disordered junkie”, but there are a lot of people who just write “Student”.
Like other chat sites with which we are more familiar, it forms its own cultural ecosystem. Here, too, there are unspoken club rules, recurrent personalities, and dramatic story arcs. Despite — or perhaps because of — posters’ grim intentions and feelings of mental isolation, most are friendly and solicitous towards one other, apparently searching for a welcoming tribe. This juxtaposition of gregarious form and nihilistic content feels surreal, though I expect regulars get used to it.
On the top of every page, there is now an official response to the Ofcom announcement, talking about “a clear and unprecedented overreach by a foreign regulator against a US-based platform”. Owners say they “reject this interference and will be defending the site’s existence and mission”. There are also new threads from concerned users. Reads one: “I live in the uk and we’re very anti suicide and i don’t want… this website to be connected to my death in any way in case the authorities do some investigation.”
Such forums test the limits of many stalwarts about free expression, mine included. Like the BBC, I choose not to mention the site in question’s name here, and to be vague about other details. Indeed, its existence is a difficult thing to write about at all. It is not that suicidal ideation can be conjured out of the blue in a casual passer-by; the worry is about what finding the site might do to someone already in the throes. I can see how prolonged contact with the enveloping atmosphere of helpful, judgement-free camaraderie — part-cosy and part-bleak — could easily speed up a person’s desire to die, as well as giving them new information about available means. Even Mumsnet users worry about what their favourite site does to their mental health. Quite frankly, this one seems a lot worse.
“Such forums test the limits of many stalwarts about free expression, mine included.”
The Samaritans stresses that “Suicidal behaviour is extremely complex and can rarely, if ever, be attributed to a single cause”. This is obviously true; human suffering tends to sprawl messily over several issues at once, and depression often can’t tell the difference between a boulder and pebble. This fact gives the lie to attempts to politically weaponise particular suicides by depicting them in simplistic terms, whether they be by trans-identified children or teachers inspected by Ofsted.
But it is also true that in a complex causal chain leading up to an event, we can identify significant precipitating factors. During the Reformation, the suicide rate rose in both England and Germany, arguably due to the increased emphasis on personal moral responsibility. In 1860s St Petersburg, there was a vogue for suicide due to “civic grief” at deplorable societal conditions. Explanations of why some particular person takes his own life can cite large-scale events and trends like these; but also include small-scale events like a fateful meeting with a particular person, or even with a text. After publication of Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther, depicting the hero’s suicide as a merciful release from the tragedies of life, there was a spate of copycat deaths among romantic-minded student readers. Why not then a chance meeting with a website; or even with an article that writes about a website?
In fact, society has long been reticent to talk a lot about suicide for fear that it sets a spark going in already parched psychic tinder. Medieval chroniclers and coroners would write in euphemisms, describing people dying “of an excess of grief”, or drowning “by the temptation of the Devil”. The 13th-century prior Caesarius of Heisterbach skirts around the matter of attempted suicides in his writings on miracles: “I would tell you many recent examples of this sort of depression, but I fear it would endanger weaker souls to hear or read such things.” Even on forums dedicated to suicide, such as the one Ofcom is presently looking at, some users can’t quite bring themselves to mention the word. They write of their longing to “CTB” or “catch the bus” instead.
But reticence to name suicide, as such, is not just due to worries about inadvertent participation in other people’s tragedies. Historically, it was also a response to feelings of shame associated with the deed — and therefore the word — made vivid by the perception that deliberate self-destruction was a grave offence against God. For failed attempts, there could be draconian retribution from Christian authorities. Almost unbelievably, jailing people for attempts continued in England until the end of the Fifties. And even in today’s secular society, feelings of shame are reported among survivors, not just for having failed but also for having tried at all. Ostensibly worried about stigma, in recent months pro-assisted dying MPs such as Kim Leadbeater have strongly objected to the word “suicide” for the deliberate self-killing of people “already dying”, apparently unaware that it would follow you couldn’t murder a terminally ill person either.
In a sense, then, pro-suicide sites can be seen as a deformed but intelligible response to residual religious associations of shame: a kind of proud and unabashed reclaiming of the right to self-annihilation. Viewed in that light, they are of a piece with the 18th-century Romantic view that suicide could be a positive grasping of one’s autonomy, demonstrating independence from religion and even from nature itself. German has a literary word for it: a Freitod (“free death”), as opposed to Selbstmord (“self-murder”) or Selbsttötung (“self-killing”). Dostoevsky satirises this idea in Demons with the engineer Kirillov, a character enslaved by his obsessive desire to kill himself as a means of asserting self-government: “If God exists, then all will is his, and I can’t escape his will. If he does not exist, then all will is mine… I am killing myself in order to show my independence and my new terrible freedom.”
Modern day Kirillov-types, monomaniacally focused upon freedom, will presumably leap to the defence of pro-suicide sites in order to protect both the word and the deed from outside interference. They will deny there is ever such a thing as having the better part of your mind taken over by hostile forces. It is always you who is ultimately in charge, for better or worse; even in the throes of depression and loneliness, enticed by the warm words of fake friends, on an apparently welcoming website. At the other end of the scale we find people like Leadbeater, trying to get the word banned for what are technically still suicides, on the spurious grounds that death is not deliberately chosen at all in such cases, but is already happening anyway.
Both stances involve self-serving fictions: one of total responsibility, the other of none. Somewhere in the middle is the truth: that the common good requires the use of clear, unambiguous language about the nature of suicide; but also to avoid glamourising and validating it, for fear of who might get caught up. Indeed, these are two sides of the same coin. There’s neither shame nor glory in any suicide; but making pro-suicide websites is nothing to be proud of.
