I remember a time– or at least a certain assortment of times and places within my online presence– when telling people to kill themselves was not considered acceptable, at all.

I remember when it was in fact taboo, an atrocity on the level of going around calling people racial slurs.

And I think these times and places were formative enough for me that my own sensibilities respond with a similar kind of shock, whenever I see people in online spaces (especially spaces that tend toward being politically progressive and supportive of mental health concerns!) acting as if this somehow is a tolerable thing to say.

I don’t even see the reasoning for it, at all.

I mean… yes, I can see some of the reasoning behind sometimes, in certain egregious circumstances, wishing that a particularly horrible person would die. I can imagine saying that I hope Donald Trump or Elon Musk doesn’t live much longer. I can even understand the cartoonish death-wish expressed over PhotoMatt’s excessive and prejudiced use of Tumblr’s ban function. A statement like “I hope he dies in an exploding car full of hammers” may be satisfying to say, and it’s clearly neither a death threat nor capable of causing actual harm in itself (although I can’t really say I was surprised that he used his notoriously overeager ban-hammer in response).

But in expressing a hope for death, why in the world would one ever phrase it as a hope for that death to be self-inflicted?

Even assuming a worldview where you hate a person entirely, you want nothing good for them, and you consider them so irredeemable they should die, why pick a method that has them doing it on their own terms?

I can imagine wishing for an enemy like Trump or Musk to die in a horrific and humiliating accident caused entirely by his own hubris. That would at least be a source of some schadenfreude, assuming one hates the person enough. But suicide can’t possibly be satisfying in that way. It’s usually not among the most painful ways to go, nor is it the most degrading– it more often elicits sympathy than ridicule.

Is it a sense that you want your enemy’s spirit completely broken before death? That you want him to realize that he is worthless and doesn’t deserve to live, and for his final choice to be acting on that?

I find that hard to believe.

Because whenever a supposedly irredeemable person does seem to realize the extent of his own wrongdoing– whenever such a person admits to his crimes, apologizes, acknowledges that he’s done things for which he has no right to expect forgiveness– none of those who previously hated him ever seem satisfied at all! In fact it’s typical for the response to be that he doesn’t actually mean it, isn’t actually sorry, and is still just trying to manipulate everyone.

Even suicide, if it happens under these circumstances, is more likely to be attributed to cowardice and a fear of well-deserved punishment. Those who hated the person don’t often seem happy if the death occurred by suicide. They wanted it to happen through that well-deserved punishment instead– for the enemy to be executed, or to be incarcerated and then killed in a prison fight, or to lose all his money and starve on the street.

They want it to happen entirely against his will. They want him to be utterly defiant up to the moment of death, never accepting that he deserves it– because that’s the most satisfying type of person to see die.

So then, why is “kill yourself” still a thing people say?

Perhaps the urge to say that, instead of something like “I hope you die in a hammer explosion,” is an attempt to avoid being accused of making death threats? Because some people (like Photomatt) will take the latter insult as a threat, unreasonable as that is. And if someone did die in an explosion, after others had expressed a wish for that to happen, maybe the death would look suspicious, and be treated as a homicide encouraged by those expressed death-wishes?

But suicide-baiting really isn’t preferable on those grounds.

If a person is repeatedly told “kill yourself!” and then does, there is quite a bit of legal precedent for holding the suicide-baiters accountable for it! Choosing that particular verbal attack is not, in a legal or ethical sense, any better than expressing a wish for an accident or illness. It’s often worse, because when directed at a person with vulnerable mental health, it can directly cause the harm it describes.

And maybe this is why people still say it.

Maybe, to some of the angriest of us, it feels like the closest you can get to maybe actually causing the death of the person you want to see die. Even if it’s not as satisfying a death as you’d ideally like to see.

Maybe it’s like the fantasy of writing a name in a Death Note, or casting a spell, or praying to God for vengeance. The fantasy that your words could actually do something against the person you want to hurt, no matter how little real power you have to affect anything at all in their life.

But realistically, the only harm it’s likely to cause is to others, people who may even be your friends.

Those who have struggled with suicidal thoughts– and now see that you are someone who would use suicide-bait against someone you hated– and may now be evaluating the danger of you someday placing them in that category.

It’s the same thing as mocking an enemy’s appearance or disability. It’s an attack vanishingly unlikely to hit the target, and far more likely to hurt those closer to you.