cross-posted from: https://reddthat.com/post/1360444
For context: One of the rules in that community is that you aren't allowed to post anything related to suicide. In a mental health community.
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They're not trying to be a crisis intervention space, but more of a maintenance space for people that aren't that bad off yet.
You have to pick one as a small community, you can't be both. Because the internet-community-available tools (listening empathetically to the problem, mainly) to help at one phase can potentially hurt at another, and there isn't just one set of tools that always helps all people suffering different stages of difficulty, that can just be universally employed. Particularly at this young-community scale, where there just aren't that many participants yet.
It's regrettable, and I think this should probably be explained in the rules so they don't come off as arbitrary, but it is the way it is.
If this was a private therapy space, where "patient conversations" were private, we would not have this problem.
If the reason is triggering, you are ill-informed. Discussing suicide does not trigger suicidal ideation, having open discussion about it can in fact push people to reach out. Now that is not to say that random strangers on the internet should be handling suicidal people, but refusing them an outlet to reach out is arguably more harmful as long as actually suicidal people are referred to the proper channels if they post.
I disagree, chain suicides do exist and we need to carefully evaluate if our actions could be causing more of those than the people we're helping.