RainAndSadness
Administrator
- Jun 12, 2018
- 2,083
So the BBC wrote an article about us a few days ago and I decided to respond to some questionable claims. But I want to point out right away I'm not going to address the claim that we're pro-suicide in this thread. I'm working on a thread right now, parallel to this thread, deconstructing that claim. And it's a very important thread because the claim that we're pro-suicide has been circulating for a few years now and it's very important to address that claim seperately and without the backnoise of this poorly written BBC article. I just want to make that clear, I'm not dodging that accusation but I want to focus on some other nonsense in this thread here.
And another reason why this thread isn't gonna be a very elaborate response is because I've already digged into the coverage of our forum in this thread - responding to the 2021 NYT article, in this thread - responding to the hysteria about the SN epidemic and in this thread I gave a very extensive response to Tantacrul who made a viral video about us and there is a follow up on other content creators who acted irresponsibly when talking about this forum. And that's just a few of the threads I've written over the years. And it's simply boring to repeat the same talking points over and over again when none of the journalists ever adressed any of my statements responding to the media in the first place, let alone any of the almost 2000 posts I wrote over the course of 5 years. Like they literally pretend I don't exist, as you'll see a further below.
So. In other words, all the talking points of the BBC have been addressed in other threads and the community of our forum also gave a lot of pushback to the narrative of the BBC article in this thread. So when even affected people, the supposed victims of this forum, people who are struggling with suicide ideation every day, disagree with your narrative about this forum, something obviously can't be right. I mean isn't it interesting that most opposition to this forum always comes from outsiders looking into us - and these people ususally don't deal with suicidality - and people who are familiar with this community, people who have spent a lot of time here and talked to our members and therefore know how things are run, disagree entirely with the way this forum has been framed?
I think the biggest red flag is the fact that yet another news outlet decided to talk about us and not with us. It's again a missed opportunity to highlight the struggles of this community. And that's been a constant theme over the years, I've talked about this over and over again. For example back in 2022 when I called out the NYT article, I already mentioned this seemingly ignorant approach to suicide.
Read here. I can only recommend to read my response to the NYT because it's still as relevant today as it was two years ago.
They made the exact same mistake again. I mean, if you care so much about the struggles of our members, why didnt't you decide to give them a voice? Why did you only talk to grievings family members, not to the people affected by suicide ideation themselves? Why are you not talking to people who want to exercise their right to die, people who suffer every single day without relief and people who can explain to you why the perspective of this forum is important? Why didn't you give them space to talk about the things that made them suicidal, right? I'm just guessing but I assume it's because it makes the entire situation look a liiiittle bit more complicated than it's presented in your article? Maybe if suicidal people started to talk about the issues that brought them to the brink of suicide, your readers would realize that this forum doesn't play as much of a role in their decision making as you made it look like. And you don't want that, right? The narrative was already clear before you did any research, the forum is bad, the forum is to blame and the forum alone makes people end their lives - for magical reasons, that's literally your narrative. No, let's not dive into the background of any of these people, let's just infantilize them and make them look like they had no agency over their own life.
And I mean the title of the article is literally 'Failure to act' on suicide website linked to 50 UK deaths - linked in what way? You're implying that people ended their lives because they had an account on our forum, strongly implying not just a correlation but a causation and you completely ignore the point that people who struggle and therefore want to end their life are more likely to make an account in our forum because they're allowed to discuss their struggles here. Like this is simple statistics, you need to demonstrate that this forum is linked to these deaths, you fail to do that during the entire article.
So yeah, that's the narrative of the BBC article. You could have literally approached some members and asked them how they feel about your framing or why they use the forum. Like the why is the most fundamental question you need to ask when you want to understand suicide and why a certain community exists. But instead, the only people who get to talk about our forum are the ones who want to take it down, and these are people who were left behind when someone committed suicide. So asking them is obviously not a very good idea if you want to approach suicide from a rational and level-headed viewpoint. And don't you think that's kind of an imbalanced reporting, leaving out the perspective of suicidal people and only talking to people who obviously don't (want to) understand suicide? I don't understand it. It's just surprising how experienced journalists, veterans of their job, fail so spectacularly when trying to talk about our forum. Like it's almost like they tried to make the most uninformed, ignorant and sensationalist article about this forum as possible. It's certainly a candidate. And then you have politicans praise the BBC article as "one of the most important and decisive examples of public sector broadcasting in many years. It will save lives." when they even fail to do the very basics and completely disregard their journalistic objectivity - what a joke.
Anyway, let's talk a bit about meme-worthy statements of the article next. For example, they open their article with this sentence, stating they don't name the forum - obviously with the goal to not expose anyone to it, right. They want to limit exposure.
The article claims:
And that's not the first time they have refused to mention our forum. They also did it here, explaining they want to limit exposure to the forum. But let's check out what happened with the registrations when the BBC released their article.
Oh yeah, the registrations almost tripled. Now, such articles are very short lived compared to Youtube videos, which get boosted by the algorythm and exposed to new people over a long period of time, that's why the increase in the registrations this time was only temporary while the Tantacrul video has boosted us permanently and you can still see that in the registrations. Before Tantactrul released his video, we had like 20-30 registrations per day, we're still at approximately 100 per day. Just to put this into perspective, a video that was published almost one year ago still boosts our forum to this day. Thanks a lot, Tantacrul.
Anyway, I want to congratulate the BBC for actually not exposing anyone to the forum, this clearly worked very well in this case. The few hundred people who decided to make an account after reading your article certainly appreciate that. Great work, Angus Crawford. I also want to point out that many of the registrations over the past few days came from the UK. The constant public talks about our forum has an impact, it drives people to us.
So, I think this meme here sums it up very well.
I want to thank @Againstthewind for this excellent piece of art.
And you know, they complain about the size of this forum but it's exactly articles like this one that contributed a lot to our growth over the past few years.
The problem is, all of these reporters who are so enlightened and intelligent can't stop talking about this forum for two seconds and then you're surprised that this forum has already tens of thousands of members? And why do you think this forum is so popular among suicidal people and those struggling with depression? You would know if you had asked anyone in our community - which you didn't do. But this article is 'one of the most important and decivice examples of public sector broadcasting in many years' according to some political hack. While this article leaves open the most important question. Serious question, what's even the benefit of every single news outlet repeating the same garbage talking points over the course of 4 years without answering even the most basic questions? Here are some prominent examples.
Incels Are Running An Online Suicide Forum That Was Blamed For A Young Woman's Death - from 2019
People Are Dying After Joining a 'Pro-Choice' Suicide Forum. How Much Is the Site to Blame? - from 2020
Mother speaks out against suicide forum after son's death - from 2021
Why a website with explicit directions for suicide remains active - from 2021
Fight to block pro-suicide website that discusses substance linked in spike to deaths - from 2022
Where the Despairing Log On, and Learn Ways to Die - and of course the notorious NYT article
Like did you really bring any new substantial information to the table with this particular BBC article? No, right. If you think the popularity of Sanctioned Suicide is a problem then I hate to say it but you contributed to the problem. Every single one of you, like what do you think was going to happen when you give this forum so much free exposure? We're not advertising ourselves, you do that - for free. There is no question about it, all of these articles are essentially redundant. The BBC didn't provide any new information at all. Yeah, they flew to the US to harass someone, an altercation that lasted 5 seconds... wow - that has so much value for your readers. How much money did the BBC spend on that flight?
Let's look at another statement, which raises more questions than anything.
Hm... no-one knows who is running it.
That's an interesting question. Who is running this forum? Who could be running this forum... I don't know.
And before I head over to the last and most important point of that article, I want to address this petition quickly, which was written right when the BBC article was published.
www.change.org
And they claim the following.
They claim in that petition that "these forums" have played a significant role in this figure. Ehh... no? The following suicide rate is from the website of the UK goverment. As you can see, there is no increase of the suicide rate since 2018 and that's when the forum was created. In fact, you can clearly see the suicide numbers decrease slowly until 2007 and the numbers of suicides slowly increased again over the years. So you can't possibly blame us for a trend that already started years before this forum was a thing. And a claim alone isn't evidence. You need to demonstrate that your claim is true. You can't just point to some numbers and blame us for a higher suicide rate without actually making the case that these are linked to us.
I marked the red line when the decrease in the suicide rate stopped and where you start to see a slow increase of the numbers, the male suicide rate even spiked before the forum existed - how do you explain that? That's what happens when you have people who have no clue what they're talking about make demands to the goverment to take "immediate action" to take something down...
This article provides some context as to why young people might commit suicide and I mean it's generally no secret that younger generations aren't doing so great in our world. They're more likely to have mental health issues compared to other generations.
But yeah, sure let's just pretend taking down a forum, which is merely a symptom of a dysfunctional society, is going to drastically reduce the suicide rate.
Finally, I want to address a claim that's been circulating for a very long time now. Joe's goodbye note. I'm sure you've seen it by now, Melanie and Catherine mention it every time they talk to the media and they also uploaded it to Twitter, see here.
The BBC article also picked this up and included this in it's story, of course without fact-checking and consulting us first.
They repeated that claim in another BBC article.
Now, some of you might think, well that's weird - why would someone who used the forum and praised it in the past, ask their parents to shut it down while they exercise their right to die? Well, the answer is actually easy and once you understand the context, you'll understand it had nothing to do with him opposing the right to die, the forum or anything that's discussed here. The situation is actually way less complicated.
Let's a take a look at his account. We can find two warnings, both 50%, given for posts written in the partner megathread because he was actually looking for someone else to ctb with. And the partner megathread is a thread that has very specific rules and he violated these rules. You'll notice there are only a few days between these warning, either way - it resulted in 100% on his account and that led to an automatic ban.
Like nobody manually applied a ban to his account, the system did that automatically. And nobody knew, like for years we didn't know that, I didn't know that either until I looked into his account. And I'm pretty sure the moderator who applied the second warning also didn't notice it. In other words, this member simply slipped through the system, if he sent us a ticket, we would have most likely removed a warning and he could have continued to use the forum.
But that didn't happen. Instead, he made another account back in April 3, the account was rejected. One day later he died.
So just to sum it up again to make it clear for everyone.
Joe made an account in this forum on March 29.
The first warning was applied on the same day, March 29.
The second warning was applied on April 1 and it led to a permanent ban.
Joe made another account on April 3.
He died one day later, on April 4 according to the news.
Now, does the context I've provided make sense to you? I think it does. Joe didn't ask for the forum to be taken down because he felt exploited or pushed into suicide, as his family claims. He didn't disagree with us on the philosophy, he didn't disagree with our stance on the right to die. In fact he used the partner megathread to find someone who would depart with him, that's where the warnings came from. Okay. And I think his goodbye letter was simply an act of anger. Like he made another account one day before he left, so he gave it another chance, possibly to find a partner to end their lives together because the sad truth is, nobody wants to die alone. But we're forced to die alone if we don't want anyone to compromise our right to die and intervere with our decision. But he couldn't do that because we banned him and that caused him to write that goodbye note, urging his family to shut down the forum.
Now, let's compare these stories. Melanie claims he wrote the goodbye note because he saw the evil behind the forum. He hated it. He wanted it to be taken down because it's so repulsive, right? Despite him praising the forum just one week before he left, despite him making a new account after we issued a ban, one day before he took his life. No. That doesn't make sense, in my opinion. I think what I've just described is the reason for the goodbye note. He was banned. And nobody likes to get banned from a community that provides support. And the reporters would have known that if they actually talked to us, instead they just listened to only one side and completely misrepresented the nature of that goodbye letter.
And it's sad, I think this might even be absolute proof that if he hadn't been banned, maybe Joe wouldn't have taken his life three days later. Maybe that proves that the forum and the support network that comes with this community actually prolongs lives. I hate to say it but that makes 100x more sense than the media narrative about us pushing people into suicide or Melanie's story about Joe's letter, alright. This forum has a positive impact and it does prolong people's lives, you can literally find confirmation of that if you read the posts in this forum. And you know how often members of our forum essentially said, "hey, when they take down the forum, I'll have to ctb. I won't have a support network anymore. I'll be alone". It happens all the time, that's a serious issue and it's been ignored ever since the media has talked about us. They don't want to improve society and fix the dependance of suicidal people on this forum, no they want to just pull the rug from your feet, which would send so many people into a pit of loneliness and despair and it would push them over the edge. Some people are dependant on this forum. They need it. That's the reality because you can't compensate for that forum right now. And none of the journalists acknowledge that because they've been fed lies by angry hateful people, relatives of people who decided to end their suffering and the vast majority of these people were adults by the way, and instead of directing their hate toward the systemic causes of their suffering, the things that made them struggle in their life in the first place, they direct all their energy and hatred towards us - simply because we're a convenient scapegoat and they want to pretend that everything is perfect out there. No, as someone who has depression, BPD and gender dysphoria I can tell you it's not. And I have so much more insight into the mind of a suicidal person than you'll ever have - because I'm one of them. And that's why this forum works so well. It's suicidal people looking after suicidal people and that's what people want. They want to talk to people who understand, who relate and who know how it feels like. That's why this community is so important and that's how it prolongs life, through peer-to-peer support and a different approach, tackling the issues without the moralizing undertone and forced narrative that happens in different settings when you talk about your struggles. We do that from a pro-choice perspective and that's what people want.
But we're the scapegoat. We will always be the scapegoat. And as long as we're the scapegoat, we're not going to get it right. That's for sure. The fact that people blame this forum, still to this day, just proves that we're unable to tackle suicide with the maturity and sensibility that's needed. And that's really sad. Instead, I'm portrayed as a villain who enjoys death and that's why I run this forum. That's literally their narrative. Really. I'm barely holding on myself but sure. It's not like I went through the same like everyone else who made an account in this forum. It's not like I have that experience, being a suicidal person in a society that is incapable to deal with suicide in a constructive manner. I couldn't just disagree with the way society is handling things, no - I have to be the bad guy of course. So all of you out there can pretend if we just ban this one forum, all the problems will go away. It's literally cope.
Look. we're not going anywhere. I'm not going anywhere. The more they oppose us, they more they yell at us, they more they try to take us down, the more I'm motivated to keep fighting. You're not going to silence us. We deserve a voice and that's what this platform does - it gives marginalised people who are overlooked in this cruel world a voice. I know it makes you feel uncomfortable, reading all these posts in this forum, posts describing people's suffering and I know you would love to just shut it down, swipe it all away and pretend it doesn't exist because that's essentially what you're going to do when you take this forum down. You're going to erase so much suffering. All the posts here are just a mirror and you can't handle it. And you deserve that mirror, you don't get to look away. Look at us and listen(!) - don't look away, don't close your eyes. All these posts in this forum, millions of posts, are a reflection of all the invisible pain that's in our world and what you see here is just a tiny percentage of all the people who are struggling and I can tell you right now, there are so many more out there, so many people who don't have a voice who are just feeling like that, all over the world. This forum is merely a symptom of that pain. You should be thankful to have insight into the mind of struggling people and use this ressource to do something positive, something that goes beyond these shallow hotlines as if they're the cure to all struggles - instead you want to shut this forum down, pretend it has never existed and just move on with the status quo. Yeah, that worked so well over the last few decades. As long as you don't realize that preventing suicide doesn't mean there are less people who are miserable on the planet you're never going to succed. Even all the programs in the world aren't going to help you until you understand that.
Anyway, I think that's it. I'm already working on other threads trying to deconstruct some other narratives, mainly that we're pro-suicide, which just isn't true. I hope I managed to point out the issues with the approach of the BBC, the incomepetence of those in charge and how this forum isn't the dark ominous place as it's been portrayed in the media. Thanks for reading.
And another reason why this thread isn't gonna be a very elaborate response is because I've already digged into the coverage of our forum in this thread - responding to the 2021 NYT article, in this thread - responding to the hysteria about the SN epidemic and in this thread I gave a very extensive response to Tantacrul who made a viral video about us and there is a follow up on other content creators who acted irresponsibly when talking about this forum. And that's just a few of the threads I've written over the years. And it's simply boring to repeat the same talking points over and over again when none of the journalists ever adressed any of my statements responding to the media in the first place, let alone any of the almost 2000 posts I wrote over the course of 5 years. Like they literally pretend I don't exist, as you'll see a further below.
So. In other words, all the talking points of the BBC have been addressed in other threads and the community of our forum also gave a lot of pushback to the narrative of the BBC article in this thread. So when even affected people, the supposed victims of this forum, people who are struggling with suicide ideation every day, disagree with your narrative about this forum, something obviously can't be right. I mean isn't it interesting that most opposition to this forum always comes from outsiders looking into us - and these people ususally don't deal with suicidality - and people who are familiar with this community, people who have spent a lot of time here and talked to our members and therefore know how things are run, disagree entirely with the way this forum has been framed?
I think the biggest red flag is the fact that yet another news outlet decided to talk about us and not with us. It's again a missed opportunity to highlight the struggles of this community. And that's been a constant theme over the years, I've talked about this over and over again. For example back in 2022 when I called out the NYT article, I already mentioned this seemingly ignorant approach to suicide.
Read here. I can only recommend to read my response to the NYT because it's still as relevant today as it was two years ago.
They made the exact same mistake again. I mean, if you care so much about the struggles of our members, why didnt't you decide to give them a voice? Why did you only talk to grievings family members, not to the people affected by suicide ideation themselves? Why are you not talking to people who want to exercise their right to die, people who suffer every single day without relief and people who can explain to you why the perspective of this forum is important? Why didn't you give them space to talk about the things that made them suicidal, right? I'm just guessing but I assume it's because it makes the entire situation look a liiiittle bit more complicated than it's presented in your article? Maybe if suicidal people started to talk about the issues that brought them to the brink of suicide, your readers would realize that this forum doesn't play as much of a role in their decision making as you made it look like. And you don't want that, right? The narrative was already clear before you did any research, the forum is bad, the forum is to blame and the forum alone makes people end their lives - for magical reasons, that's literally your narrative. No, let's not dive into the background of any of these people, let's just infantilize them and make them look like they had no agency over their own life.
And I mean the title of the article is literally 'Failure to act' on suicide website linked to 50 UK deaths - linked in what way? You're implying that people ended their lives because they had an account on our forum, strongly implying not just a correlation but a causation and you completely ignore the point that people who struggle and therefore want to end their life are more likely to make an account in our forum because they're allowed to discuss their struggles here. Like this is simple statistics, you need to demonstrate that this forum is linked to these deaths, you fail to do that during the entire article.
So yeah, that's the narrative of the BBC article. You could have literally approached some members and asked them how they feel about your framing or why they use the forum. Like the why is the most fundamental question you need to ask when you want to understand suicide and why a certain community exists. But instead, the only people who get to talk about our forum are the ones who want to take it down, and these are people who were left behind when someone committed suicide. So asking them is obviously not a very good idea if you want to approach suicide from a rational and level-headed viewpoint. And don't you think that's kind of an imbalanced reporting, leaving out the perspective of suicidal people and only talking to people who obviously don't (want to) understand suicide? I don't understand it. It's just surprising how experienced journalists, veterans of their job, fail so spectacularly when trying to talk about our forum. Like it's almost like they tried to make the most uninformed, ignorant and sensationalist article about this forum as possible. It's certainly a candidate. And then you have politicans praise the BBC article as "one of the most important and decisive examples of public sector broadcasting in many years. It will save lives." when they even fail to do the very basics and completely disregard their journalistic objectivity - what a joke.
Anyway, let's talk a bit about meme-worthy statements of the article next. For example, they open their article with this sentence, stating they don't name the forum - obviously with the goal to not expose anyone to it, right. They want to limit exposure.
The article claims:
And that's not the first time they have refused to mention our forum. They also did it here, explaining they want to limit exposure to the forum. But let's check out what happened with the registrations when the BBC released their article.
Oh yeah, the registrations almost tripled. Now, such articles are very short lived compared to Youtube videos, which get boosted by the algorythm and exposed to new people over a long period of time, that's why the increase in the registrations this time was only temporary while the Tantacrul video has boosted us permanently and you can still see that in the registrations. Before Tantactrul released his video, we had like 20-30 registrations per day, we're still at approximately 100 per day. Just to put this into perspective, a video that was published almost one year ago still boosts our forum to this day. Thanks a lot, Tantacrul.
Anyway, I want to congratulate the BBC for actually not exposing anyone to the forum, this clearly worked very well in this case. The few hundred people who decided to make an account after reading your article certainly appreciate that. Great work, Angus Crawford. I also want to point out that many of the registrations over the past few days came from the UK. The constant public talks about our forum has an impact, it drives people to us.
So, I think this meme here sums it up very well.
I want to thank @Againstthewind for this excellent piece of art.
And you know, they complain about the size of this forum but it's exactly articles like this one that contributed a lot to our growth over the past few years.
The problem is, all of these reporters who are so enlightened and intelligent can't stop talking about this forum for two seconds and then you're surprised that this forum has already tens of thousands of members? And why do you think this forum is so popular among suicidal people and those struggling with depression? You would know if you had asked anyone in our community - which you didn't do. But this article is 'one of the most important and decivice examples of public sector broadcasting in many years' according to some political hack. While this article leaves open the most important question. Serious question, what's even the benefit of every single news outlet repeating the same garbage talking points over the course of 4 years without answering even the most basic questions? Here are some prominent examples.
Incels Are Running An Online Suicide Forum That Was Blamed For A Young Woman's Death - from 2019
People Are Dying After Joining a 'Pro-Choice' Suicide Forum. How Much Is the Site to Blame? - from 2020
Mother speaks out against suicide forum after son's death - from 2021
Why a website with explicit directions for suicide remains active - from 2021
Fight to block pro-suicide website that discusses substance linked in spike to deaths - from 2022
Where the Despairing Log On, and Learn Ways to Die - and of course the notorious NYT article
Like did you really bring any new substantial information to the table with this particular BBC article? No, right. If you think the popularity of Sanctioned Suicide is a problem then I hate to say it but you contributed to the problem. Every single one of you, like what do you think was going to happen when you give this forum so much free exposure? We're not advertising ourselves, you do that - for free. There is no question about it, all of these articles are essentially redundant. The BBC didn't provide any new information at all. Yeah, they flew to the US to harass someone, an altercation that lasted 5 seconds... wow - that has so much value for your readers. How much money did the BBC spend on that flight?
Let's look at another statement, which raises more questions than anything.
post: 2220098 said:
Hm... no-one knows who is running it.
That's an interesting question. Who is running this forum? Who could be running this forum... I don't know.
And before I head over to the last and most important point of that article, I want to address this petition quickly, which was written right when the BBC article was published.
Sign the Petition
Urge National Crime Agency and Government to Address Pro-Suicide Forums in the UK
www.change.org
And they claim the following.
They claim in that petition that "these forums" have played a significant role in this figure. Ehh... no? The following suicide rate is from the website of the UK goverment. As you can see, there is no increase of the suicide rate since 2018 and that's when the forum was created. In fact, you can clearly see the suicide numbers decrease slowly until 2007 and the numbers of suicides slowly increased again over the years. So you can't possibly blame us for a trend that already started years before this forum was a thing. And a claim alone isn't evidence. You need to demonstrate that your claim is true. You can't just point to some numbers and blame us for a higher suicide rate without actually making the case that these are linked to us.
I marked the red line when the decrease in the suicide rate stopped and where you start to see a slow increase of the numbers, the male suicide rate even spiked before the forum existed - how do you explain that? That's what happens when you have people who have no clue what they're talking about make demands to the goverment to take "immediate action" to take something down...
This article provides some context as to why young people might commit suicide and I mean it's generally no secret that younger generations aren't doing so great in our world. They're more likely to have mental health issues compared to other generations.
But yeah, sure let's just pretend taking down a forum, which is merely a symptom of a dysfunctional society, is going to drastically reduce the suicide rate.
Finally, I want to address a claim that's been circulating for a very long time now. Joe's goodbye note. I'm sure you've seen it by now, Melanie and Catherine mention it every time they talk to the media and they also uploaded it to Twitter, see here.
The BBC article also picked this up and included this in it's story, of course without fact-checking and consulting us first.
They repeated that claim in another BBC article.
Now, some of you might think, well that's weird - why would someone who used the forum and praised it in the past, ask their parents to shut it down while they exercise their right to die? Well, the answer is actually easy and once you understand the context, you'll understand it had nothing to do with him opposing the right to die, the forum or anything that's discussed here. The situation is actually way less complicated.
Let's a take a look at his account. We can find two warnings, both 50%, given for posts written in the partner megathread because he was actually looking for someone else to ctb with. And the partner megathread is a thread that has very specific rules and he violated these rules. You'll notice there are only a few days between these warning, either way - it resulted in 100% on his account and that led to an automatic ban.
Like nobody manually applied a ban to his account, the system did that automatically. And nobody knew, like for years we didn't know that, I didn't know that either until I looked into his account. And I'm pretty sure the moderator who applied the second warning also didn't notice it. In other words, this member simply slipped through the system, if he sent us a ticket, we would have most likely removed a warning and he could have continued to use the forum.
But that didn't happen. Instead, he made another account back in April 3, the account was rejected. One day later he died.
So just to sum it up again to make it clear for everyone.
Joe made an account in this forum on March 29.
The first warning was applied on the same day, March 29.
The second warning was applied on April 1 and it led to a permanent ban.
Joe made another account on April 3.
He died one day later, on April 4 according to the news.
Now, does the context I've provided make sense to you? I think it does. Joe didn't ask for the forum to be taken down because he felt exploited or pushed into suicide, as his family claims. He didn't disagree with us on the philosophy, he didn't disagree with our stance on the right to die. In fact he used the partner megathread to find someone who would depart with him, that's where the warnings came from. Okay. And I think his goodbye letter was simply an act of anger. Like he made another account one day before he left, so he gave it another chance, possibly to find a partner to end their lives together because the sad truth is, nobody wants to die alone. But we're forced to die alone if we don't want anyone to compromise our right to die and intervere with our decision. But he couldn't do that because we banned him and that caused him to write that goodbye note, urging his family to shut down the forum.
Now, let's compare these stories. Melanie claims he wrote the goodbye note because he saw the evil behind the forum. He hated it. He wanted it to be taken down because it's so repulsive, right? Despite him praising the forum just one week before he left, despite him making a new account after we issued a ban, one day before he took his life. No. That doesn't make sense, in my opinion. I think what I've just described is the reason for the goodbye note. He was banned. And nobody likes to get banned from a community that provides support. And the reporters would have known that if they actually talked to us, instead they just listened to only one side and completely misrepresented the nature of that goodbye letter.
And it's sad, I think this might even be absolute proof that if he hadn't been banned, maybe Joe wouldn't have taken his life three days later. Maybe that proves that the forum and the support network that comes with this community actually prolongs lives. I hate to say it but that makes 100x more sense than the media narrative about us pushing people into suicide or Melanie's story about Joe's letter, alright. This forum has a positive impact and it does prolong people's lives, you can literally find confirmation of that if you read the posts in this forum. And you know how often members of our forum essentially said, "hey, when they take down the forum, I'll have to ctb. I won't have a support network anymore. I'll be alone". It happens all the time, that's a serious issue and it's been ignored ever since the media has talked about us. They don't want to improve society and fix the dependance of suicidal people on this forum, no they want to just pull the rug from your feet, which would send so many people into a pit of loneliness and despair and it would push them over the edge. Some people are dependant on this forum. They need it. That's the reality because you can't compensate for that forum right now. And none of the journalists acknowledge that because they've been fed lies by angry hateful people, relatives of people who decided to end their suffering and the vast majority of these people were adults by the way, and instead of directing their hate toward the systemic causes of their suffering, the things that made them struggle in their life in the first place, they direct all their energy and hatred towards us - simply because we're a convenient scapegoat and they want to pretend that everything is perfect out there. No, as someone who has depression, BPD and gender dysphoria I can tell you it's not. And I have so much more insight into the mind of a suicidal person than you'll ever have - because I'm one of them. And that's why this forum works so well. It's suicidal people looking after suicidal people and that's what people want. They want to talk to people who understand, who relate and who know how it feels like. That's why this community is so important and that's how it prolongs life, through peer-to-peer support and a different approach, tackling the issues without the moralizing undertone and forced narrative that happens in different settings when you talk about your struggles. We do that from a pro-choice perspective and that's what people want.
But we're the scapegoat. We will always be the scapegoat. And as long as we're the scapegoat, we're not going to get it right. That's for sure. The fact that people blame this forum, still to this day, just proves that we're unable to tackle suicide with the maturity and sensibility that's needed. And that's really sad. Instead, I'm portrayed as a villain who enjoys death and that's why I run this forum. That's literally their narrative. Really. I'm barely holding on myself but sure. It's not like I went through the same like everyone else who made an account in this forum. It's not like I have that experience, being a suicidal person in a society that is incapable to deal with suicide in a constructive manner. I couldn't just disagree with the way society is handling things, no - I have to be the bad guy of course. So all of you out there can pretend if we just ban this one forum, all the problems will go away. It's literally cope.
Look. we're not going anywhere. I'm not going anywhere. The more they oppose us, they more they yell at us, they more they try to take us down, the more I'm motivated to keep fighting. You're not going to silence us. We deserve a voice and that's what this platform does - it gives marginalised people who are overlooked in this cruel world a voice. I know it makes you feel uncomfortable, reading all these posts in this forum, posts describing people's suffering and I know you would love to just shut it down, swipe it all away and pretend it doesn't exist because that's essentially what you're going to do when you take this forum down. You're going to erase so much suffering. All the posts here are just a mirror and you can't handle it. And you deserve that mirror, you don't get to look away. Look at us and listen(!) - don't look away, don't close your eyes. All these posts in this forum, millions of posts, are a reflection of all the invisible pain that's in our world and what you see here is just a tiny percentage of all the people who are struggling and I can tell you right now, there are so many more out there, so many people who don't have a voice who are just feeling like that, all over the world. This forum is merely a symptom of that pain. You should be thankful to have insight into the mind of struggling people and use this ressource to do something positive, something that goes beyond these shallow hotlines as if they're the cure to all struggles - instead you want to shut this forum down, pretend it has never existed and just move on with the status quo. Yeah, that worked so well over the last few decades. As long as you don't realize that preventing suicide doesn't mean there are less people who are miserable on the planet you're never going to succed. Even all the programs in the world aren't going to help you until you understand that.
Anyway, I think that's it. I'm already working on other threads trying to deconstruct some other narratives, mainly that we're pro-suicide, which just isn't true. I hope I managed to point out the issues with the approach of the BBC, the incomepetence of those in charge and how this forum isn't the dark ominous place as it's been portrayed in the media. Thanks for reading.
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