view the rest of the comments
Mental Health
Welcome!
This is a safe place to discuss, vent, support, and share information about mental health, illness, and wellness.
Thank you for being here. We appreciate who you are today. Please show respect and empathy when making or replying to posts.
The rules for posting and commenting, besides the rules defined here for lemmy.world, are as follows:
Rules
1-Posts promoting paid products and services of any kind are not allowed here.
2-All posts and comments must be helpful and supportive. Do not put vulnerable people at risk.
3-Do not DM or ask to speak privately to any of our members unless they specifically request it.
If a person from this community disturbs you in a comment, please report the comment. If you receive a DM you did not request, send a screenshot of the DM in a message to a moderator. This is a bannable offense.
4-Suicide, Self-Harm, Death-- Extended discussions are STRONGLY DISCOURAGED here. First, mods and community members are caring people, but not experts in crisis situations. Second, we want to avoid Lemmy becoming like many commercial social media platforms, where comments can snowball into counterproductive talk.
If you or someone you know needs more help than can be found here, please refer to the pinned resources.
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.
Partner Communities
- Therapy
Neurodegenerative Disease Support
Friends and Family of People with Addiction
To partner with our community and be included here, you are free to message the current moderators or comment on our pinned post.
Community Moderation
Some moderators are mental health professionals and some are not. All are carefully selected by the moderation team and will be actively monitoring posts and comments. If you are interested in joining the team, you can send a message to ZenGrammy for more information.
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.