Oh well. Godspeed, spaceman

Spaceman, we like having you around. I think you may have some troubles and it would be a good idea to get some help. There are a lot of great things that only us living people get to experience and there is always more to know and learn.

Also, no way anyone should leave the Trump show early. I bet it has a great ending.

I banned him with instructions to call Mat or the suicide line and to get off the internet a bit, as is standard.

dont ****ing ban him, i reached out to him via PM

i'm sure that logging in to a "you have been banned" screen is gonna make him feel just wonderful. jfc

We're also not going to deal with live blogging suicide negotiations on the forum. This is how Mat has wanted it done.

Don't forget Game of Thrones and new Han Solo movie imo.

Yeah, this really isn't a healthy environment for someone with serious mental health problems. Hopefully Bryce can find IRL people to reach out to.

This seems like a good decision, Bryce seems to be somewhat stressed by the forums lately. Hopefully it passes and he is able to return when he's in a better place mentally.

White people are very strange.

white people def strange and ****ed up, but from the little i know about bryce, he has more than one very valid reasons to be extremely stressed out

Bryce if you read this please text me, I lost your number.

This is horrible. Anyone that has Bryce's contact info please notify authorities if possible or PM me and I will.

@Bryce - please bro, don't do it. Think about all the people that care in your life and how much they'll be devastated.

Is that how members of this community are treated when they're most in need of help?

I mean you don't ban blatant internet trolls when you should but then ban somebody for contemplating suicide? I didn't see that in the rules.

Banning an established member of a community that he was respected in won't decrease his chances of choosing to kill himself. If anything it did the opposite.

It's pretty heartless to treat vulnerable forum members with such coldness. Your Nuremberg Defense above doesn't absolve you of guilt in this situation either.

I know I'm going hard in the paint here but I think it's needed sometimes. Actions like these need to be shamed. Chucking people out like this is a cruel extension of the throwaway culture we live in.

We really don't need another LirvA situation ITF.

Contemplating suicide is not the time to be on the internet. It is time to talk to a real person. It's not a permanent ban. It's an enforced break and a direction to talk to someone.

Suicide is definitely a sore spot for me.

The people I know who were able to step back from the ledge were helped by those they reached out to, not sent away to call a stranger and talk to them.

There's a real chance given the internet that if he engaged here some dip**** would tell him to grease fire himself, this isn't the place for that. You don't stage an intervention in a public bar where some douche can go through and offer to do blow in the bathroom

This is far too serious for the d ecision to be down to amateur opinion and voluntary mods.

The site has to have a policy (seems like they do) and I very much hope it's informed by expert opinion.

Yeah, I've seen this show before and I assure you internet politics forums are not a safe environment for people with serious mental health problems. idk how you expect untrained, unpaid staff to handle situations where some of the more toxic dip****s decide to needle the folks with BPD.

That's a fair point.

At the same time, restricting forum members who would help privately by banning the vulnerable person is unproductive and potentially destructive.

The people I know who successfully committed suicide didn't give off obvious hints like Bryce did. They were happy one day and dead the next. Nobody saw it coming.

Anyway, I guess all we can do is hope for the best given the ban.

Banning someone who is suicidal seems like a genuinely terrible choice. My understanding of suicide interventions is that one engages until it can be handed off to a professional. I have seen a few internet suicide discussions in my time. The key steps are to provide referral information and to keep emphasizing it until they actually take the step of using the referral OR to get enough contact information to contact authorities on their behalf.

Both of Wookie's defenses are nonsense. A quick referral as part of the ban is very unlikely to be effective in contrast to a continual outpouring of attempts by community members; indeed, the pairing with a ban makes the single intervention doubly ineffective. Secondly, my observations of these events have generally been that the community is incredibly supportive (and of course mods lightening delete anything that isn't). While it might generally be true that "don't be on the internet" is a good policy, a public forum like this trying to support someone who is suicidal is not the worst part of the internet.

OK, if you want a different SOP for suicide threats on the forum, take it up with Mat. That is how Mat handled it in the past. I defer to how he wants it handled.

I just read this page as my first page of the thread.

This is my face right now

Will do. I don't really feel equipped enough with the literature to make a super persuasive case, but my gut feeling here is that the policy - and your defense of it - is completely wrong. And it is certainly important enough to demand more than a flippant response.

Wait, you're genuinely the ONLY person in here who thinks like that? Really?

I already miss the discussion about these students at Evergreen State College?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2cMYfxOFBBM&t=3s