You are entitled to your opinion, but I disagree. And answering your point that people wouldn't have found a method that's acceptable without the site, no. They would have used something acceptable them that wouldn't have worked but would permanently damaged them because they knew no better...paracetamol, ibuprofen, antifreeze, to name a few. Knowing that the methods easily accessed, like overdoses of otc medications, can harm permanently and cause agonising pain can prevent them being used. The more reliable methods described on SaSu are difficult to obtain, and)or are likely to induce very strong SI, and are less likely to be used, with the net result that the person stays alive. Aren't there around 50k members on here? Some have been members for years and are still here. Yet there aren't even thousands of deleted accounts, and even when an account is deleted we don't know why. The knowledge about the pain, violence and negative aspects of different methods, and the support from this community will have, I'm positive, saved more lives than caused death. I'm one so far. I used to keep a store of paracetamol and diphenhydramine to ctb, and came VERY close to taking them. On here I was able to ask people who'd done that but been saved what it was like and the horrific effects described put me off ever using them. I have sn now, but I'm still not sure it's painless, and the requirement for fasting and taking antiemetics prevents me from doing anything impulsive, which was a real and constant danger before I found SaSu.
Sanctioned Suicide may present itself as a safe space, but it's undeniably a dangerous platform that
enables and even encourages suicidal ideation. The truth is, for every person who claims it helped them avoid a harmful method or prolonged their life, there are
countless others who have been
led down a path toward death simply because they were given the "permission" to entertain the idea. The reality is, for many, SaSu
doesn't help—it
facilitates. It gives people a
blueprint for how to end their lives when they might otherwise have struggled with the decision long enough to seek real help. By providing methods, advice, and a community that shares suicidal thoughts, the forum doesn't just make it easier for people to find ways to die—it actively
normalizes the thought of it as an
acceptable solution to pain.
And let's be clear here: for
every life SaSu claims to have saved, how many have
ended because of it? How many people have walked into that forum, felt understood for the first time, and then been given the tools and methods that made ending their life feel like a plausible option?
How many have died because of it? The truth is, no one can provide the full number of lives lost due to SaSu, but given the nature of its content, I'd bet
it's more than a few.
SaSu doesn't cure the underlying
mental health struggles, it doesn't change the
despair or the
pain that bring people there in the first place. It simply
validates it, offering a quiet form of
complicity. In many cases, it's not just a space for people to talk—they're actively
reaffirming their decision to die, without challenge, without the confrontation of better possibilities, and without professional intervention. And for those still struggling with deep thoughts of suicide, SaSu doesn't offer recovery—it
offers acceptance of the worst part of them.
If we're talking about the net effect of this forum, it's clear:
it kills more people than it saves. People looking for methods aren't just finding alternatives to painful options—they're finding
solutions that keep them focused on death rather than life. We can argue about "safety" and "less pain," but that's the
trap: we're not talking about survival, we're talking about
sustaining suicidal thoughts.
In the end, what SaSu really offers isn't a solution to suffering, it's a
shortcut to death.
