Most members who have been active in this forum for a while know that the media has blatantly misrepresented the purpose and philosophy of this forum for years. For example, let's take a look at these articles here.
Although Mississauga man Kenneth Law currently faces criminal charges for allegedly selling sodium nitrite and other lethal supplies for the purpose of self-harm, one issue that remains unresolved is the manner through which many of Law’s alleged customers appear to have found him and his...
toronto.ctvnews.ca
There's been a spike in deaths in Australia linked to a lethal substance frequently discussed on the offshore forum. Some of those who've died spent time on the site, which experts say has guided suicidal people toward death instead of away from it.
www.abc.net.au
The titles already give it away and contribute a lot to the public opinion that we are "pro-suicide".
We're more than just a "pro-suicide" forum as the media likes to smear us, very often implying we're some kind of cult. We're a very diverse community with thousands of members, with most of them struggling to the extent that they think about suicide, some more than others, and that results in a wide variety of content, from conversations about recovery and life to discussions around suicide and the right to die. And yes, I strictly reject the claim that we are "pro-suicide," people in our forum recover all the time and when they announce they're doing better, we cheer them on in this community. [
1][
2][
3][
4][
5][
6][
7][
8][
9][
10] This is just a small selection of threads I've found by doing a 5 minute search on this forum and all of them are members announcing their departure because they found something to live for and in some cases, our community directly contributed to that change. For example, here are two specific threads where members of the forum specifically point out this community has contributed to their recovery, again - with nothing but positive feedback under these threads. Nobody is telling them to change their mind, nobody is encouraging suicide, nobody is frowing upon their decision. It's nothing but compassion and acceptance for someone's decision. This is not
pro-suicide. This is pro-choice.
I realised I actually got to the point where I don’t feel like I belong here anymore. I don’t feel the need to die as much as I did. It feels incredibly weird and wrong as I really thought this was what I actually wanted really bad and that there is no chance that it would ever change. And here...
sanctioned-suicide.net
I think my recovery is going well so I'm going to leave this website for now. I found an amazing person who I love very much, she managed to heal me in ways i didn't think were possible. We spent Valentines Day together and i think i finally want to live. This recovery section really helped me a...
sanctioned-suicide.net
Okay. And there is not one single case that I'm aware of, where someone reported significant improvement of their situation, which then resulted in an overhelmingly negative response to that thread. It just doesn't happen. I gave the examples above. If you can prove me wrong, do it. There are so many threads of people basically announcing 'hey, I'm doing better, SaSu helped me through that journey and I'm going to leave this forum now to enjoy my life' and that's a good thing and these threads are always met with kindness and praise as I've demonstrated above. How does that match the accusation of us being "pro-suicide"? Doesn't this kind of behavior displayed in these threads demonstrate a pro-choice position of the overhelming majority of participating members in our forum? This is direct and irrefutable evidence that this community is not pro-suicide but passionately pro-choice. Furthermore, there is not one thing I've said in the last 5 years that would suggest I'm pro-death or pro-suicide. And I think that's quite significant given I'm the admin of this forum, right. I made very clear that I'm pro-choice and everything I've said so far in my position underlines that notion. I have also made clear towards
bad actors who try to exploit this forum that suicide encouragement isn't okay. Sadly, trolls with no intuition and nuance sometimes mistake us for 4chan 2.0 and invade this forum with the intention to cause harm. But there is a difference between encouraging suicide and respecting someone's voluntary and well thought-out choice to exercise their right to die. One is pro-suicide and one is pro-choice. That tiny bit of nuance sadly goes unnoticed by the majority of journalists who report on this forum.
The problem is that most people who cover this forum simply don't understand language. The media suggests we're "pro-suicide" - and that's a position that prefers suicide
over all other options, right? That's at least how I understand that word. Being pro-suicide means you think suicide is the right answer to every problem, that you
should commit suicide if you're thinking about it, without any second thoughts. And that's how we're framed. But that's just not true, we don't suggest to anyone what's the right decision, that in itself makes us pro-choice per definition. It's up to anyone in this forum to make their own decisions, we don't tell anyone what to do - that's explicitly drawn out in the rules. And what you do with your own life is by the way a deeply personal matter, what decision someone makes in regards to their own welfare is not the business of anyone here and anyone out there either. If you want to live is a question only you can answer. Okay, so it's factually inaccurate to report the entire community, thousands of active members with a diverse background and history, as generally "pro-suicide" - as if we're a homogenic hivemind that all have the same thoughts and ideas, it's simply dehumanizing and insulting. And the
philosophy of this forum underlines the fact that we are pro-choice very clearly. So again, the constant reporting of this forum as a pro-suicide forum has no factual basis other than a extreme misunderstanding of what it means to be pro-choice in regards to suicide. And again, recognising and accepting someone's decision to exercise their right to die isn't "pro-suicide" the same way that accepting and recognising someone's decision to (not) have an abortion isn't "pro-(or anti-)abortion" either. It's a "pro-choice" stance in both cases because in both cases you're merely accepting someone's decision and action that are expressions of individual and bodily autonomy. You make the decision, nobody else - that's the philosophy of this forum. And giving you a choice to make your own decisions, even when "destructive" (and that's again a question of perspective), is pro-choice. That's the consequence of a liberal interpretation of individual autonomy. And that alone is the determining factor if a position is pro-choice or forced-anything, such as pro-life or pro-suicide. This forum doesn't make the case that there should be more suicides. In fact we say there should be less suicide but as I've pointed out in my
response to the BBC, the methods which are applied to achieve that goal are wrong and cause more harm than good. I've also outlined this here in
my most recent thread about SN regulation. But I don't think I have seen a representative amount of members make the case that more suicides are a preferrable outcome, we as a community hope that the lives of people who use this forum improve, of course. That's also the position of every single moderator, by the way. Me included. And I would never promote someone to the position of a moderator who doesn't have the best interest of every single member in mind. I have written countless posts and threads discussing suicide prevention and I have literally begged the media to use this forum as a resource to better understand suicidality. But instead they're demonizing us because that's just easier. Don't get it twisted, the current reporting is a mix of both ideological barriers which prevents people from understanding the purpose of this forum but also straight-up laziness, which prevents people from doing their own investigative research and instead they merely adapt the narrative of other journalists that's and why I'm writing this thread right now.
So again, we're pro-choice. And being pro-choice always comes with an accepting notion for the decision you make, right. When I accept and respect a decision you make, that doesn't mean I encourage that decision. These are differences between encouraging a decision or acknowledging and respecting it. So we're pro-whatever-decision-you-make-for-your-own-life as long as you don't harm anyone else. That's inherently pro-choice and until you demonstrate and explain to us why we're more pro-suicide than pro-choice, why it's logically correct to call an entire community of suicidal people collectively pro-suicide, I will reject any article that follows that narrative and this thread here is going to be the standard response to any future articles that calls us pro-suicide and in the future, any questions about this forum can be answered by reading this thread because it contains all the answers you need to know. I also don't take any journalist seriously who writes obviously biased articles and I have no desire to interact with them. I also hope that answers why knocking on my door is going to be a waste of time...
right, Angus?
Next, now that I've outlined that we're pro-choice, I'm going to explain to you why it's the morally correct position. If you want to infringe on someone's individual and bodily autonomy, you need very good reasons - which hopefully is a statement that journalists out there covering this forum agree with. And that applies even more so to a fundamental human right like someone's right to die. Your subjective feeling that someone prolonging their suffering might be the better outcome long-term doesn't outweight the perceived emotional and mental distress of the person who wants to die, so their decision to end said pain is always more important than your demand that they should keep suffering. In other words: you do not override someone's lack of consent to stay alive. You have no right to say that they should have to endure their (physical or mental) pain for your own emotional peace, you have no right to force them. We use the same logic to justify abortion, the needs of someone who seeks out an abortion is more important than your subjective feeling as to why it's wrong to have one. And that's literally the concept of individual autonomy and it's the empathic approach to the question whetever someone has a right to die. Relief from pain is a good thing and we need to stop pretending it's not. Of course, if you don't have any empathy for suicidal people, you'll be unable to see that. And if you've never been suicidal, you have no idea how it feels like to be in that position, to sit on hot coals, to suffer so much that you just want to die. That's why suicidal people hate when non-suicidal people speak for and over us and sadly, that's what the media has been doing all along, constantly infantilizing suicidal people in the process and pretending to act in our best interest as if
our input doesn't count, and they're showing us exactly everything that's wrong in our world. We have so many members in this forum, like we literally count 45k registered members at this point and it's concerning that the exchange between journalists who want to understand this forum and members of this forum who agree with the philosophy of this place hasn't happened in 5 years. And that's not our fault, I know that members have reached out to these journalists who call us pro-suicide. The problem is, that they're not interested in interviewing people who could humanize Sanctioned Suicide and justify the existence of this forum, as an alternative to the current oppressive approach that's the status quo when it comes to preventing suicide. On the other hand - the exchange between journalists and people who
oppose this forum for very irrational reasons has happened very frequently, and that's the problem. There is an inbalance in the research that's done to understand this forum and represent both sides. In other words, there has been no attempt to understand us, that was never the intent -
from the start.
And yes, there are some people, for example staff members, who do not want to give an interview but that's because there has been no attempt so far to accurately portray this forum in good-faith and no sign that these reporters are ready to protect people's privacy. But there are enough people who would be open to given an interview to defend SaSu's existence, for example
here and
here - but as I said, interviewing people who use this forum and giving them space to talk about the necessacity of a website like this forum would contradict the narrative so it doesn't happen. Again, I reached out to a journalist a few years ago, before I was even a moderator, trying to defend this forum and we did actually talk for almost an hour but they never published that interview.
So yeah, the constant misrepresentation of this forum is annoying but it isn't surprising given the journalists covering this forum aren't interested in objective and factual reporting and instead have always emotionalized and dramatized the conversation around this forum by highlighting the apparent
repulsive and outrageous nature of this forum or
by posting the names and faces of members who have exercised their right to die, as if their implied opposition (none of them have spoken out against SaSu) to suicide has more value and legitimacy than the needs of those who want to die, while also pushing the reasons why they were suicidal in the first place into the background and focusing on their membership in this forum instead to make the forum look responsible for their decision to end their lives and not the real life problems that haunted them every day. And I think that's disrespectful to the people who have passed away. None of those articles are written with the intention to motivate systemic change and more awareness for things that make suicide an attractive option in the first place, it's all about writing bombastic headlines, shifting the blame to the forum. It's obvious. Why wouldn't these journalists want to talk about the systemic causes of suicide, which is certainly a dry topic and instead make a forum responsible which is merely a symptom of a dysfunctional society? We're not the reason why people want to die. According to the data I've seen, the increase in suicide numbers that so many journalists complain about has started
before this forum even existed and most members who make an account here in this forum communicate in their registration that they've been suicidal before, sometimes for years - and that's why they want to join this forum. The forum clearly isn't the problem here. They come to this forum as suicidal people because
this place has to offer something that's appealing to them... So wouldn't it be interesting for these journalists to look into the reasons why these members who make an account here were suicidal for years, instead of blaming us? It's quite easy, because it doesn't fit the narrative that we're the bad guys.
Another issue is that a big portion of the journalists who are covering this place get most of their information from people who oppose this forum and these are very often
the protagonists of their coverage. These are people who oppose us for ideological reasons and push for legislative change to criminalize this forum because they have lost someone to suicide themselves. The problem is, they do not care about the systemic causes of suicide that drove their loved ones to take drastic measures to escape their pain. What they care about is deplatforming the forum because we're an easy scapegoat. And that makes sense, it's easier to cope with the idea that this forum pushed someone into suicide instead of reflecting and thinking about potential signs for someone's suicidality you might have missed or holding the people in charge (politicans and lawmakers) accountable who are blocking systemic change which would allow struggling people to live under better conditions. And shouldn't
that be the goal, create a more compassionate and empathic society that makes people want to stay alive voluntarily instead of relying on coercision to prolong people's lives? There is so much you can do to improve people's lives that doesn't attack people's freedom, right. Not all but the majority of those journalists that have covered us and portrayed us in a very negative light in the past are directly in touch with people who are campaigning to shut us down and sadly they refuse to cover this forum with the same neutrality that's applied for the coverage of other, equally controversial, topics. They throw
journalistic standards out the window. Journalists like
Angus Crawford,
Aisling Murphy and
Thomas Daigle have never investigated this community properly because if they did, they would know we're anything but "pro-suicide" - as I've explained above - and they would also know that describing a community with 45'000 total members with one word ("pro-suicide") is the most dishonest thing you could possibly do. I'm not gonna sugarcoat it. That's the result of listening to grieving people. What they're experiencing is without a doubt painful but they're not good picks for a level-headed and rational conversation on ethical issues like suicide (prevention) and the right to die. Journalists took the input of these people who want to see the forum gone as reliable information without fact-checking claims and taking into consideration that there might be a certain bias, influenced by emotional pain. And that's how you end up with very one-sided reporting, over and over again. Because again, these people have a very clear interest in framing this forum in the worst way possible and feeding those journalists
false information, for example that we allow members to use this forum as a marketplace or that we encourage suicide when none of that is true. Their self-proclaimed goal is to make us disappear - that's obvious when you look
their Twitter activity and who they blame for the death of their loves ones. And these opponents of our forum are motivated by very negative emotions and that's why they doxxed members of our forum in the past, something that's always brushed aside when these people are interviewed and portrayed as victims in these articles. For example, Kelli Wilson - who is one of the most vocal opponent of this forum
has doxxed a member of our community, Catherine Adenekan has
done the same and on top of that
celebrated the suicide of a member who has taken their own life,
mocking their goodbye thread and Lee Cooper has repeatedly
threatened to murder the founders of this forum on Twitter yet they're still seen as credible sources and still featured in their coverage on our forum despite the very obvious fact that they have an agenda and they will do anything necessary - literally walking over corpses at this point - to achieve their goals. They also
harassed a trans woman who they mistook for me relentlessly. They make very clear that doxxing suicidal people is part of their playbook. These repulsive actions aren't the topic of this thread but it's important to mention that these people are not credible sources for anything related to this forum. I might dive into their problematic online conduct in more detail in a seperate thread if people are interested in that. But they're vigilantes who take the law into their own hands because we're operating this forum 100% legally and none of their political efforts to deplatform us have paid out. That's why they're harassing and intimidating those who run this forum and those who participate as members. They have every incentive in the world to push a certain narrative and spreading lies and misinformation is part of their strategy.
But it gets even worse. Some of the journalists I've mentioned above are
members of the
anti-Sanctioned Suicide group on Facebook.
This group was founded by Kelli Wilson, the same person that created the website
Fixthe26. The same person who also doxxed a member of our forum as I just mentioned before and the same person who said my predecessor needs to get
publicly executed and claimed
I'm not a human. Does anyone here think that it's a coincidence that journalists who who call us pro-suicide and mirror the "pro-suicide" narrative without wasting any time to fact-check anything are also members of a Facebook group founded by someone who wants to take down the forum and is on the record encouraging physical violence and doxxing someone who committed suicide one month later? I think that's a very questionable connection there for journalists who are supposed to remain some objectivity.
We also made
a Twitter thread about this problematic alliance and
Thomas Daigle has since left that group while
Aisling Murphy still remains a member. I guess some journalists aren't even pretending to be neutral here. Kelli's
Twitter account has been banned as a result of all the harassement towards our community and she is actively evading her ban right now with
her new account.
Again, unlike the journalists who write these articles I'm not here to tell you what to think. But I find it very suspicious that journalists who have described us as "pro-suicide" (repeatedly) are in a group of vigilantes trying to take down this forum - with questionable methods - and it looks a bit to me like some people are using their position as "reporters" to act as someone's mouth piece. I don't think it's a coincidence that these articles are written like that. Kelli also never made it a secret that she sends emails to journalists, politicians and authorities to influence the narrative - and she has admitted on Twitter that she doesn't care if the information is correct
as long as it furthers their agenda.
That's how badly the coverage around our forum is compromissed, specific individuals were able to take advantage of naive journalists and influence the framing of this website. How could you question the framing of a grieving parent? You don't, you just look at the frontpage of this forum and you know all you need to know - if you're a lazy journalist. So again, journalists covering our forum never tried to understand us and why we exist, there was never any investigative research and an attempt to portray this community fairly. It's also odd that they also never even looked at my post history in this forum. I mean if they aren't interested in obtaining a representative view of our community on subjects like suicide and suicide prevention, something that would debunk the claim that we're pro-suicide, they could
at least look at my posts - not that I'm representative in any way but I'm the admin after all, right - if you really wanted to know what's the intention behind a forum, what are the thoughts that went into it, how its existence is justified, you could look at my output and include some of my posts into these articles. There are countless threads and posts that explain my position on suicide. But they don't even do that because it directly contradicts their reporting because I've said plenty of things that highlight the importance of meaningful suicide prevention. And no, infringing on someone's autonomy
isn't meaningful suicide prevention
And it's remarkable that journalists covering this forum until 2021 made a big deal out of the fact that the founders identified as incels, evidence that supposedly highlighted the sinister nature of this community [
1][
2][
3][
4]. You don't really need to do any investigative research into this community anymore when you can just brush this forum aside as some malicious incel trap and that was the framing on this forum back in the days. But for some reason, now that I'm running this community, backgrounds suddenly aren't important anymore. They've never mentioned my background - that I'm a trans woman. There were so many articles that made their coverage on this forum all about the founders' identification as incels but none of the articles that were released after they stepped down highlighted the fact that I'm suicidal myself and a trans woman, someone who supports left-wing policies. They never mentioned in any of the articles that I'm suffering from mental health issues myself and that this could maybe be the reason why I have a different approach to suicide. Wouldn't that be important context when you cover this forum? Wouldn't that give insight into the
why I'm doing this? Yeah, maybe if you point out that the person running this forum is trans and has a long history of struggling with several mental health conditions themselves it would kinda ruin your well crafted narrative about evil incels who run this forum with malicious pro-suicide intentions, right. And that's certainly a reputation that haunts this forum to this day. I think we all know why they media has pretended that I don't exist, in the 2.5 years I've been running this forum, they have mentioned my username once... they're clearly trying to pretend that I don't exist while they still harass and annoy one of the founders, even going so far to
camp three days in front of this house just a few months ago when he hasn't been involved in this forum for over 2 years. Because it serves the narrative that we're an evil pro-suicide forum and that's easier to sell when you can make an incel responsible for the existence of this forum because it allows you to just ignore the left-wing, anti-oppressive trans woman who has been suicidal for many years, who supports individual autonomy and meaningful suicide prevention via systemic change. In other words, talking about my background would humanize this community to a degree. It's all tied to their narrative.
And no, I'm not saying these journalists are conspiring together and working out the best way to smear this forum. It's all coming together naturally, lazy journalists talking to the same few dishonest people and other lazy journalists just copy-pasting the narratives of other articles. I mean, if the BBC calls us "pro-suicide", it has to be correct, right? And you can kinda guess their political viewpoints on certain topics when you read their articles and some of those who have reported on us have a very clear opinion on this forum, as you can see
here and
here and that contributes to their bias. Why else would they be a member of a anti-Sanctioned Suicide Facebook group? I wasn't aware that journalists should have an opinion on subjects they research but it explains why there isn't even an attempt to write nuanced articles. Tony Smith also
complimented these vigilantes who harassed members for their 'hard work', again proving that there is a clear opinion on our forum... We're the bad guys, period.
And look, it was no problem for me to
debunk the NYT when they wrote an article about our forum and just recently I
updated my response to them with more empirical data because that's how I approach these subjects unlike these journalists. I don't just make claims, I try to back them up with data whenever possible. I have also
addressed the SN hysteria in another thread. I don't fear to challenge the media and confront myself with their claims, it gives me great joy to dunk on these clowns who imply in their articles that we contribute to a rising suicide rate when they're unable to provide evidence for such claims. And there is
also data that indicates easy informational access to resources regarding ways to exercise your right to die (in plain terms how to commit suicide)
does not increase the overall suicide rate but it rather influences
how people exercise their right to die. And it makes sense, this kind of information only affects those who already made a decision to end their life. People think reading peaceful ways to exercise your right to die somehow makes you magically suicidal and having open access to methods therefore increases the amount of people who end their lives but again, that's not how it works. The media always portrayed the forum as the single most important contributing factor to a member's suicidality but people are already suicidal when they make an account - as I explained above. And it's a voluntary process. Nobody has ever forced someone to sign up on this forum and we don't advertise this forum either. Every single member has a feature on their profile to deactive their account and leave whenever they desire. There is
nothing that keeps anyone here who doesn't feel comfortable with the subjects discussed in this forum. And again, we see why people make an account here, there are so many people who describe their lifelong struggles with suicidality, their suffering that's been a part of their entire life and failed attempts to recover as reasons why they want to make an account here. All of this contradicts the idea that people are trapped in some kind of pro-suicide prison,
where people are sucked in and unable to leave. The entire premise of the reporting about this forum is based on the misconception that people who stumble upon this forum, healthy people with no struggles at all, magically commit suicide because the content of this forum is literally brainwashing them and the data I've included in my response to the NYT or the BBC does not confirm that idea. In fact it debunks the idea that this forum has any meaningful impact on nationwide suicide numbers, both in the US and in the UK. We don't change the metrics, even if we tried we couldn't. That's the reality.
It's a blatant misrepresentation of how suicide works in its entirety. People make an account here by choice. They participate in this forum voluntarily. And any decision they make for their own life has little to do with this forum. They're conflating causation and correlation. We don't make people think about committing suicide. People who think about commiting suicide make an account here. That's an important difference. But that would again go against the narrative.
It's also weird that the recovery section is invisible to everyone who thinks we're pro-suicide. Maybe I'm hallucinating but pro-suicide communities aren't exactly known for their
recovery resources...
And none of those articles covering our forum with sensationalist headlines seem to remember that pro-choice communities have existed as long as the internet, as these articles from
2011 and
2015 prove. It's safe to say that the philosophy of this community will not disappear but re-emerge under a different name if this forum is taken down successfully and no amount of oppression and censorship will change that, as long as fundamental flaws in the treatment of suicidal people aren't addressed. And calling us pro-suicide at this point is merely an admission that you don't want to talk about the real problems.
Last but not least, what's "pro-suicide" seems to be highly subjective. The BBC covered
the topic of assisted suicide a few years ago and they were
even accused of a pro-suicide bias. It's almost as if people who disagree with the right to die will attack
anything that's remotely pro-choice, hm? Utterly ironic though that the BBC was attacked with the exact same slander that we have to endure right now.
We're almost done with my thread but I also want to shed some light on some academic research to further back up my position. For example, this academic paper here, which dives into the ethical dilemma of pro-choice forums, looking at both pro-life and pro-choice viewpoints and at possible solutions for the ideological conflicts that's at play here between both parties.
And, would you look at that, very early in that paper it acknowledges that the media very often describes pro-choice forums as "pro-suicide", combined with calls to shut them down. And that's exactly what's happening here and that's exactly the reason why I'm writing this thread. So again, maybe journalists aren't really doing much research here as pointed out earlier and maybe they're just dismissing this forum as pro-suicide without knowing what they're talking about or what this forum stands for. I can only recommend to read this paper, it's very interesting and it also explores the ethical conflict in communities like ours when it comes to more controversial methods like train rails due to the fact that bystanders and third parties are involved in that method. Very interesting paper and obviously approaching the issue from an open mind - unlike those journalists.
Here are some snippets.
