The thing that people misunderstand about suicide is that when a person is truly committed to doing it there is very little you can do to change their mind. For them it's like being stuck inside a burning building - their only options are either to burn or jump out of the window. Most people active on that site are already at that stage.
This is something that I have noticed. If someone is truly committed to doing it, they will seek out anything and everything to do so and there's little you can do to convince them otherwise. I have personally never gotten to that stage, and I'm thankful that I'm still around and was able to recover from that.
I don't know why Matteo committed suicide and I'm truly sorry he resorted to that. However, I don't think the website is to blame, especially since they actively discouraged suicide by train.
Yeah, I always feel sad when someone commits suicide. It's just that people find it easy to put blame on a website because that is the easier and more visible target instead of looking at the social and environmental factors that can drive a person to suicide. It's easy to say "X individuals hosts this forum, arrest them, and hang them" instead of getting to the reasons why people commit suicide in the first place. Some suicides will never be preventable, but if we can find ways to make people's lives better to where they don't feel like they don't need to commit suicide, that is the better approach. Pinning the blame on a website or on the site founders is the easy way out. It doesn't address the actual causes of suicide nor will it do any good at the end of the day.
The site holds a mirror to society on the issues surrounding suicide, and until some of these issues are addressed, there will be a need for a place like SS.
Misery loves company and that's what draws these people to sanctioned suicide. It's definitely not ideal for these vulnerable people, but then again their only alternative is complete isolation. Suicide is taboo and the mental healthcare system in most of the world is atrocious (although that's a whole other can of worms).
I agree with you here, it's not the best community as misery does love company and that also isn't healthy. It is not the ideal environment, but it is something. Being with someone during your dark moments can mean the difference between living and dying in many cases.
And if someone IS pushing someone else to kill themselves then I agree that the individual should be prosecuted to the full extent of the law.
Absolutely, if there is someone pushing someone to kill themselves, they should be prosecuted.
So what is the end goal? Nuke the internet? Burn LaMarcus at the stake?
They want to neuter the internet because they're unable to police their children on the internet. Even though there are numerous options for parental controls and filters, they would rather have the whole internet sanitized so that they don't have to do that.
I'm just an easy target. Even though I don't have any involvement with the forum anymore, they want me gone because they hold me accountable for all the deaths on the site and for the deaths of their children, which is the most asinine thing ever. They would rather chase me to the ends of the earth in the name of accountability instead of seeing about their children and monitoring their internet activity.
This crusade against sanctioned suicide could have been an opportunity to look deeper into why so many people are joining a website like this in the first place, and perhaps advocate for accessible healthcare.
Before my departure, I wanted to help suicidologists and mental health professionals better understand the site as it can prove invaluable into developing effective suicide prevention guidelines, but that never came to fruition.
