Institutions like The New York Times blame “incel forums” for suicides.

They’re ignoring the deeper problem.

Last December, The New York Times published an exposé, "Where the Despairing Log On, and Learn Ways to Die," about Sanctioned Suicide (SS), an online forum for those interested in suicide and communicating with others who might encourage them to make an attempt. Journalists Megan Twohey and Gabriel J.X. Dance linked the forum to dozens of suicides and unmasked the administrators of the site as a pair of nefarious “incels.”

In the following months, Twohey and Dance righteously covered a congressional inquiry into SS and supported calls for Amazon to ban the sale of a lethal preservative promoted on the SS forum. The narrative of an evil, incel-made website that, like plants in The Happening, is magically convincing unsuspecting users to kill themselves makes for a convenient liberal myth, but says nothing about why people want to die, or why so many in our society seek out suicide forums in the first place.

According to the CDC, the suicide rate increased 30% between 2000 and 2020, from 10.4 to 13.5 suicides per 100,000 people. There were 1.2 million attempts alone in 2020. These facts have nothing to do with suicide forums and everything to do with sociopolitical conditions. In his seminal study Suicide (1897), the French sociologist Émile Durkheim explained that suicide is a social phenomenon; individual cases reflect the state of society. Durkheim argued that variations in the suicide rate are caused by disruptions to the social equilibrium (financial crises, decadence, wars), which form pathological social states like egoism and anomie (moral deregulation leading to unchecked passions.) In egoism, the individual personality surmounts the collective personality, causing egoistic suicide due to excessive individuation and detachment from society. From his analysis of egoistic suicide, Durkheim concludes that “suicide varies inversely with the degree of integration of the social groups of which the individual forms a part.” 

Western societies under neoliberalism—with the replacement of union jobs with precarious gigs, the rising cost of higher education and urban areas, and the breakdown of families and traditional roles—are obviously becoming more egoistic. The suicides that the Times connects to SS reflect forms of social disintegration: these individuals were doing remote school, unemployed, divorced, etc. By relating suicides to their social contexts, rather than an unseemly website, we should reestablish the basic mutuality between the individual and their society.

Durkheim emphasizes that, except in cases of madness, personal circumstances do not explain suicide. He writes, “The individual yields to the slightest shock of circumstance because the state of society has made him ready prey to suicide.” The SS forum is an incidental cause that the Times mistakes for a determining one when it identifies 45 people who “died by suicide after spending time on the website.” SS can serve as a “shock of circumstance” that precedes a suicide, but they are far downstream from the state of society that made the person open to the idea of killing themselves. 

Outrage directed toward the SS forum and its administrators may be better directed toward social structures and policies that promote isolation, poverty, unemployment, and other social ills that find their ultimate expression in suicide. The United States House committee scrambling to “limit the visibility and reduce the risks” of SS exemplifies US politicians ignoring the root causes of social distress, which they actually have the power to affect, in favor of demonizing platforms on which that distress is honestly expressed. The calls for Amazon to ban the sale of a lethal preservative promoted on SS are especially ironic, given that the Times profiles a woman “who posted that she wanted to die because she hated her Amazon warehouse job.” Is the problem in this situation the preservative or Amazon?

The repression of SS is really no less than the repression of the death drive by the ruling class. But repressing the death drive online doesn’t make it go away in real life—the opposite is likelier—especially if the death drive is as elementary to the psyche as Freud believed. In Civilization and Its Discontents (1930), Freud argued that civilization is a process that individuals and societies undergo, in which they repress innate instincts toward sex and violence in exchange for physical and economic security. This repression, and the guilt it produces, means that civilization causes a state of chronic dissatisfaction, or “permanent internal unhappiness” among the civilized.

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The two primary instincts that Freud labeled as “Heavenly Powers” locked in an eternal struggle are the sexual instinct, Eros, of which libido is a manifestation, and the death instinct. The former seeks sexual satisfaction with another, and more generally to “preserve living substance and to join it into ever larger units.” The latter, the death drive, seeks to destroy the self and the other so as “to dissolve those units and bring them back to their primeval, inorganic state.”

The relation between the instincts of sex and death mirrors the relationship between SS and its apparent opposite, the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline (NSPL). Created in 2004 under SAMSHA, NSPL provides free and confidential emotional support to people in suicidal crisis through a toll-free number and website. The NSPL number appends the Times story, and Google ensures that the NSPL phone number appears when individuals search for SS in order to “protect vulnerable users.”

For a disintegrated society in a state of egoism, a call to the NSPL serves an essentially erotic function, in the sense that it brings an isolated individual into relation with the operator, who can be considered a minister of Eros—as the operator’s task is to preserve life and multiply the relations among people. In this sense, NSPL operators are agents of civilization. Freud makes clear that civilization is “a task set by Eros...one of uniting separate individuals into a community bound together by libidinal ties.” The counterforce to NSPL’s erotic, civilizing function is SS’s promise of a way out from the misery of modern society.

It’s no wonder that the SS forum was created by those who often feel most failed by modern civilization: incels. The two administrators of SS, Marquis and Serge, met through the creation of an incel website after Reddit banned the incel subreddit. Serge said that much of the discussion on his incel site was “suicide fuel” (suifuel). Angela Nagle discussed the suicidality of 4chan in her book Kill All Normies: “Forum users come to the most arguably unsympathetic place imaginable to tell others of their suicidal fantasies anonymously, where they will probably be half-jokingly told to do it.” In this way, 4chan anticipated SS, albeit with a more trollish sensibility.

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Nagle quotes one 4chan user who posted about “the guy who calls a suicide hotline to hit on the advisor.” This guy makes explicit the eroticism of suicide hotlines; he implies that at least some of the single men who call the suicide hotline hope (unconsciously) for a female operator who will save their lives, literally and romantically. At least for single men, the erotic function of suicide hotlines could be, and historically probably was, performed by phone sex hotlines. The erotic hotline resembles the suicide forum in that both mean confessing the unspeakable to an unseen, encouraging stranger.

Nagle sees in suicide forums a rejection by incels of “the perceived sentimentality of the mainstream media’s suicide spectacles,” in favor of “their own dark spectacle, in which pity is replaced by cruelty.” The sentimentality of suicide spectacles reached its teary-eyed peak with rapper Logic’s 2017 song “1-800-273-8255,” titled after the phone number of the NSPL, which he performed at the MTV VMAs surrounded by presumable survivors of suicide who wore shirts printed with the NSPL number and the words “You Are Not Alone.” The chorus “I want you to be alive” could have come from an NSPL script, voicing the demand of civilization and capital. The death drive did not remain silent, however: Lil Uzi Vert’s 2017 sleeper hit “XO Tour Llif3,” served as a suicidal counter-anthem—“All my friends are dead / Push me to the edge”—that tapped a pervasive sense of social loss.

In contrast to the sentimentality of suicide prevention, Nagle sees encouragement of suicide, insensitivity to suicide victims, and the act itself as forms of transgression against civilization. While NSPL is an erotic support to so-called “society,” SS transgresses against civilization using the death instinct. There’s popular demand for this transgression: the Times notes that SS draws about 6 million pageviews per month—quadruple that of the NSPL site. A life-affirming culture may require both: Eros to keep us from killing ourselves, and transgression to keep us from dying of boredom.

Sanctioned Suicide and the National Suicide Prevention Hotline merely extend the ancient struggle between Eros and death into relatively new technology. As long as strangers can communicate online and over the phone, they’ll give each other reasons to live and die. But hotlines and forums do not cause or solve suicide; they hold a mirror to suicidality determined by social conditions. Rerouting all despair to NSPL, or casting all blame on forums like SS, won’t affect the death wish embedded, and increasingly evident, everywhere in the culture.

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