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If BRIEF mention of these topics is an important part of your post, please flag your post as NSFW and include a (trigger warning: suicide, self-harm, death, etc.)in the title so that other readers who may feel triggered can avoid it. Please also include a trigger warning on all comments mentioning these topics in a post that was not already tagged as such.
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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.
While introducing that rule, what I had in mind was more about protecting some people from being affected/influenced by it, and less about outing suicidal people. As previously stated, a separate, connected community and services would be needed for suicide discussion and prevention, and the mods will likely do it when it's time according to their comnunity's needs.
Yeah, I agree. I think suicide specifically needs its own community. Severe problems and mild problems just need different approaches.
Severe problems ideally need people who have been there themselves, who can speak from experience. Or people who have training.
Mild problems and health maintenance are more accessible to everyone.
A suicide-focused community with dedicated professional mods would be so nice. We would be able to direct anyone who is in crisis there. Lemmy is still young and I'm not aware of a space like that to refer anyone to, though.
Fully agreed. The importance of a specific community cannot be understated. It would be good to have it be for people who had been there as peers in the community, but the mods would have to be properly trained and vetted above all else.
Rewording is probably needed. Instead of "YOUR POST ABOUT SUICIDE IS NOT ALLOWED AND YOU'RE CAUSING PROBLEMS IF YOU DO" (not what it literally says, but how it feels to read)
I think you can hit your same goals with:
It makes the intent clear, doesn't stonewall vulnerable people, and leaves room for positives posts such as a story of how someone overcame suicide (which, based on your comment sounds like they should be allowed, but the current wording make it sound like positive posts will be blocked too)
I agree with you, I only touched the rules once after opening the community to have an idea of what they should look like, and didn't really improve or elaborate on them further. It looks like the new mod team didn't really do much about it either, but that's understandable at this early stage the community is in. Here's hoping your suggestion and this comment section in general can help it be improved!
We will work on rewording it today.
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.