The Death Nobody Talks About
Researching Suicide in the Family Tree
TRIGGER WARNING:
This article discusses suicide in detail, including historical methods of death, legal penalties, and the language used in records. It is intended as a professional guide for genealogists and family historians.
In the United States, the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline is available 24/7. Call or text 988. Readers outside the U.S. should contact their local crisis line or emergency services.
Many genealogists eventually encounter a death by suicide in the family tree. It could be a seventeenth-century coroner’s inquest written in cramped legal Latin, or a great-uncle whose death certificate says one thing while the family whispers say another, or a recent loss that still hurts to think about. Whatever form it takes, it raises questions that most genealogy guides rarely address directly: How do you research it? How do you record it? How do you talk about it with the family?
This article covers the historical background, the records, the euphemisms and silences, and the ethical questions involved in reporting or publishing the finding. It deals with suicide, not with assisted suicide or euthanasia, which raise different legal, medical, and ethical questions and are treated differently in both historical and modern records.
A Note on Language
Throughout this article, I use the phrase “died by suicide” rather than “committed suicide.” The word “committed” carries centuries of criminal and religious baggage, and in a professional report or a conversation with a grieving family, language matters. “Died by suicide” is the more careful choice in modern professional writing.
Older records will say “committed,” “perpetrated,” “self-murder,” or “felo de se,” and you should transcribe those records exactly as written, without silently modernizing the language. When quoting a record, preserve the historical wording; when writing your own narrative analysis, use modern terminology.
A Note on the Researcher
Before getting into the records and the history, a practical point: researching suicides, particularly recent ones or ones that echo your own family experience, can be emotionally wearing. If you are a professional genealogist doing client work, build time into your project schedule for this kind of research. You owe your clients accurate work, and your accuracy can suffer if you are pushing through material that is affecting your concentration and judgment. This is not a weakness in the researcher; it is a feature of the material.
Why This Matters for Your Research
Suicide appears often enough in genealogical records that researchers need to know how to recognize and handle it. The U.S. Census Mortality Schedules of 1850 through 1880 recorded cause of death, and suicide appears with some regularity. Coroner’s inquest files from the colonial period forward document these deaths in sometimes unsettling detail. Historical newspapers, particularly in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, reported suicides with a frankness that would be unthinkable today, often naming the deceased, describing the method, and speculating openly about motive.
If you are doing thorough genealogical work, you are likely to encounter these deaths, and the question is whether you recognize them when you do. For much of Western history, strong social, religious, and legal pressures encouraged families and officials to hide, euphemize, or misclassify these deaths. Understanding that history is a practical research skill, because it tells you where to look and what to look for.
A Brief History of Suicide in Western Law and Religion
The legal and religious treatment of suicide shaped many of the documents you are likely to encounter, so you need that background before you can read the records properly.
English Common Law. Suicide was classified as felo de se, literally “felon of himself,” and treated as a form of self-murder. The property of the deceased was forfeit to the Crown, which could be devastating to the surviving family. The body could be denied Christian burial in consecrated ground, and in the most extreme cases, particularly before the Burial of Suicide Act of 1823, could be buried at a crossroads with a stake driven through the heart, a practice rooted in the superstition that the restless dead would haunt the living unless physically pinned in place.
These penalties were real, though their enforcement varied by time, place, and social standing. A verdict of felo de se could mean the family lost its property, though in practice some families shielded assets through sympathetic juries and local officials. This is why, starting particularly after the Restoration, coroner’s juries increasingly returned the alternative verdict of non compos mentis, finding the deceased to have been insane. An insane person could not form criminal intent, so the death was not a felony, the property was not forfeit, and the family could bury their dead in the churchyard. Studies of early modern English coroners’ records show a dramatic shift: between 1485 and 1660, the conviction rate for felo de se exceeded ninety-five percent; by the 1710s and 1720s, over ninety percent of suicides were being found non compos mentis instead.
A verdict of non compos mentis does not mean your ancestor was mentally ill; more often it means the jury was being merciful. Conversely, a verdict of felo de se tells you something about social standing, since juries were more likely to show mercy to the well-connected and to punish those with fewer local protectors.
England and Wales did not decriminalize suicide until the Suicide Act of 1961. Ireland did not decriminalize until 1993. Many Commonwealth nations inherited these laws, with some retaining them today. In the American colonies and the early United States, the legal situation varied by jurisdiction; some adopted the English common law penalties, while others were more lenient. The social stigma was widespread.
The Catholic Church. The Church denied burial in consecrated ground to suicides, a prohibition rooted in the theology of Augustine and Thomas Aquinas. In practice, enforcement depended on time, place, the local priest, the family’s standing, and whether the coroner’s jury had returned a verdict such as non compos mentis. The 1917 Code of Canon Law (Canon 1240 section 1, n. 3) listed those who deliberately took their own lives among those deprived of ecclesiastical burial. The revised 1983 Code no longer treated suicide as an automatic bar to funeral rites, though the broader prohibition on funerals that would cause “public scandal” remained.
If you cannot find a burial record in the parish churchyard, look for burials in unconsecrated sections, in civil burial grounds, or in separate registers that some parishes maintained for those denied standard rites. The absence of a burial record does not automatically mean the rites were denied; the record itself may be lost or incomplete.
The Catholic prohibition can have particular weight in areas where Catholic priests served as civil registrars. In many Habsburg territories, including parts of modern-day Austria, Hungary, the Czech lands, and Poland (Austrian partition), Joseph II’s 1784 edict designated Catholic parish registers in those territories as official state records and introduced a standardized columnar format. In these areas, a suicide denied burial rites might be absent from both the church record and the civil record, because they were the same document. If you cannot find a death entry in a Catholic parish register from the Habsburg lands and other records suggest a sudden or violent death, the absence may be meaningful.
The Church of England. Canon B 38 prohibited standard funeral rites for a person who, “being of sound mind,” had “laid violent hands upon” himself, though the prohibition had been widely ignored by clergy for decades. The General Synod approved a motion in February 2015 to amend the canon, and the formal Amending Canon No. 37 removing the restriction was promulgated in July 2017.
Eastern Orthodoxy. The canons prohibit church burial for a person who died by suicide, rooted in Canon XIV of the Canons of Timothy, Archbishop of Alexandria. If a physician certifies that the person was not of sound mind, the bishop may grant an exception under the principle of oikonomia (pastoral discretion).
This matters for genealogists working in records from the Russian Empire. Peter the Great’s 1722 decree mandated the recording of births, marriages, and deaths by the Orthodox Church in metrical books (metricheskie knigi). These books, organized in three parts (births/christenings, marriages, deaths/burials), were the primary vital records for the Orthodox population and normally included cause of death. A suicide denied rites might appear in the metrical book with a marginal notation, might be recorded without rites, or might not appear at all. Since the metrical book was often the only vital record for most people, a missing entry may leave few surviving clues. In Russian peasant communities, suicides could be buried outside the consecrated cemetery, at settlement boundaries, or in unmarked graves.
Other Christian Traditions. Lutheran practice varied by place and period; parish registers may note unusual burial circumstances or may simply omit detail. Methodist, Baptist, Presbyterian, and other Protestant traditions never had formal canonical prohibitions comparable to those in the Catholic, Anglican, or Orthodox churches. Burial practices were governed by pastoral discretion. For genealogists, the practical implication is that these records are less likely to contain explicit notations about manner of death.
Judaism. Jewish law (halacha) historically prescribed reduced mourning rites for suicides, and burial was sometimes in a separate section of the cemetery or in an entirely separate burial ground. Some communities buried suicides near the edge of the main cemetery, in a designated corner, or along the boundary wall; others maintained distinct grounds for suicides, apostates, and others denied standard rites. However, Jewish law sets an extraordinarily strict definition of “suicide” that effectively excludes most cases, and in practice most Jewish communities have long found ways to avoid classifying a death as a deliberate suicide. For genealogists, a Jewish ancestor buried at the periphery of a cemetery, in a separate section, or in a different ground altogether may warrant further investigation through chevra kadisha (burial society) records or community records. Quaker burial grounds, by contrast, rarely note cause or manner of death at all.
The Pattern. Across many traditions, suicide was condemned theologically but exceptions based on insanity or diminished capacity allowed burial and mourning rites in practice. The more formalized the prohibition (Catholic, Anglican, Orthodox), the more likely it is to have generated documentary evidence: marginal notations, separate registers, unconsecrated sections, or conspicuous absences.
The Records: Where to Find Evidence of Suicide
A note on access: many of the record types described below, particularly modern coroner’s files, autopsy reports, police reports, hospital records, and institutional records, may be restricted by law, sealed for a period of years, or available only to next of kin. Nothing in this article is legal advice; genealogists should check the relevant jurisdiction before assuming a record is available or unavailable.
Death Certificates. Modern American death certificates include both a cause of death and a manner of death. The cause is the medical mechanism (gunshot wound, asphyxiation, poisoning); the manner is the classification of the circumstances (natural, accidental, suicide, homicide, or undetermined). Manner of death can be misclassified or left undetermined because of evidentiary uncertainty, local practice, or reluctance to assign suicide without clear proof. “Undetermined” does not mean suicide; it means the evidence did not support a definitive classification. Never treat a death certificate as the final word.
Be aware that in some U.S. jurisdictions, particularly rural counties, coroners are elected officials who are not required to have medical training. The accuracy and consistency of manner-of-death classifications can vary depending on the qualifications of the certifying official, the resources available, and local norms.
Overdose deaths are a particular trap: an overdose can be accidental, intentional, or undetermined, and the line is often unclear from the certificate alone. The term “self-inflicted” also needs context; it can describe accidental injuries as well as intentional ones.
Some people die days, weeks, or months after an injury or overdose, so the death record may be far removed from the incident date. Some online death indexes strip out cause and manner details; you may need the original certificate or inquest.
Death certificate access varies widely by state. Many states restrict access for fifty to one hundred years unless you can demonstrate a direct relationship to the deceased.
Coroner’s Inquest Records and the Coroner/Medical Examiner Distinction. These are often the most valuable historical record type for researching suicides, and genealogists often underuse them. Inquest files can contain witness testimony, physical evidence, the coroner’s findings, and sometimes suicide notes. If a suicide note appears, it should rarely be quoted at length in a report or shared profile; summarize only what is genealogically necessary. Witness testimony routinely includes names, addresses, and relationships that appear in no other record.
Before searching for inquest records, it helps to understand the system in the relevant jurisdiction. Some jurisdictions use an elected or appointed coroner (who may or may not be a physician), some use a medical examiner (who is a physician, usually a forensic pathologist), and some use a hybrid system. The records generated differ accordingly: a traditional coroner’s inquest produces a jury verdict and witness depositions; a medical examiner’s office produces a medical report, often with an autopsy. In jurisdictions that transitioned from one system to the other, the changeover date determines which type of record to look for. When researching an unfamiliar jurisdiction, identifying which system was in place at the time of death is a necessary first step.
FamilySearch has microfilmed and digitized coroner’s records from numerous localities. The Missouri State Archives maintains a searchable Coroner’s Inquest Database. Cook County, Illinois, has an index to over 74,000 inquest records from 1872 to 1911. Stark County, Ohio, has digitized records from 1890 to 2002. For English research, coroner’s inquests from 1875 onward are often referenced on death certificates. The Ancestor Hunt maintains a state-by-state directory at theancestorhunt.com.
Medical Examiner, Autopsy, and Police Records. For twentieth-century and later deaths, the medical examiner’s report and autopsy findings often contain the most detailed information about manner of death. Police or sheriff’s department incident reports can also document the circumstances and may survive when the coroner’s file does not. The National Association of Medical Examiners (NAME) can help identify offices; access rules are set locally.
Mortality Schedules (1850 through 1880). The U.S. Census Mortality Schedules recorded persons who died in the twelve months before the census date, listing name, age, sex, marital status, birthplace, month of death, occupation, and cause of death. All schedules are available on FamilySearch and Ancestry. The Census Bureau estimated at the time of the 1870 census that as many as one third of all deaths went unreported.
Newspapers. Historical newspapers could report suicides with extraordinary frankness, naming the deceased, describing the method, and printing speculation about motive. The motives attributed, such as “domestic trouble,” “melancholy,” or “financial embarrassment,” were typically speculation. Unless a motive is corroborated by testimony in a coroner’s inquest, a suicide note, or other direct evidence, do not repeat it as fact.
For more recent deaths, newspapers may be less detailed because of changing journalism standards, privacy expectations, and growing awareness that detailed suicide reporting can itself cause harm, a phenomenon sometimes called the “Werther effect.” Modern reporting guidelines, such as the Recommendations for Reporting on Suicide at reportingonsuicide.org, reflect this shift. For genealogists, the practical consequence is that for twentieth-century and later deaths, newspapers become less useful as a primary source, and coroner’s files and death certificates become correspondingly more important.
Search Chronicling America, Newspapers.com, and GenealogyBank. OCR errors, variant spellings, damaged pages, use of initials, and unnamed references can cause searches to miss relevant articles.
Church Records. As described in the history section, churches could deny burial rites to suicides. If you find an ancestor who died but has no burial entry in the parish register while other records suggest a sudden or violent death, the absence is worth investigating. Some registers include marginal notes about burial circumstances; others record only the burial without indicating whether full rites were performed. In the Habsburg territories and the Russian Empire, where parish registers served as civil records, the absence of a death entry may mean limited or no surviving vital record exists.
Military Records. Military records often document a suicide where civilian records do not, and the military paper trail for these deaths can be extensive. Service records and pension files are the starting point, but Courts of Inquiry findings, Judge Advocate General records, and unit morning reports can document the circumstances of death in detail that civilian records rarely match. Morning reports may note the manner of death when recording a casualty, though the level of detail varies by period and unit. For twentieth-century and later cases, Veterans Administration hospital records and psychiatric evaluation files may document treatment that preceded the death. Service records, pension files, and many military hospital records are available through the National Archives and Fold3.
Insurance Records. Life insurance policies in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries commonly included suicide exclusion clauses, typically barring payment if the insured died by suicide within a specified period after the policy’s issue date. When families contested a denial of benefits, the resulting claim files could generate correspondence, affidavits, witness statements, and sometimes depositions containing detailed accounts of the circumstances of death, the deceased’s state of mind, and the identities and relationships of those present. These records can contain information found in no other surviving source. Investigation files sometimes surface in probate records when the family pursued the claim through the courts.
Probate and Estate Records. Suicide could affect property, inheritance, and guardianship. Probate files may contain indirect evidence: contested insurance payouts, guardianship petitions, references to the circumstances of death in widow’s claims.
Court Records. Insurance disputes, estate contests, criminal prosecutions of survived attempts, and commitment proceedings can all generate records documenting the circumstances.
Institutional Records. Some suicides or attempts appear in records from asylums, hospitals, poorhouses, jails, workhouses, or almshouses.
Family Sources. Letters, diaries, family bibles, and oral tradition all preserve information that official records obscure.
Reading Between the Lines: Euphemisms and Silences
Every pattern described below is a research lead, not a conclusion. None of these signals, taken alone, is evidence that a death was a suicide.
“Died suddenly.” Ambiguous by design: heart attacks, strokes, accidents, overdoses, and suicides have all been described this way. The phrase carried stronger implications in earlier decades, when it was the accepted newsroom euphemism for a death the paper could not describe more plainly.
“Died unexpectedly.” In modern obituaries, often chosen by families who want to acknowledge the shock without specifying the cause. “Died at home” by itself is a weaker signal.
“Died of natural causes.” When applied to a younger person, particularly in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, this phrase sometimes appears in records where the death was plainly not natural. It can indicate a deliberate misclassification by a sympathetic official or a family that controlled the narrative around the death.
“By his own hand.” In death records and obituary contexts, usually not ambiguous.
Omission of cause of death. When an obituary conspicuously omits cause of death, particularly for a younger person, it indicates a death the family did not want to explain publicly.
No obituary at all. Can also reflect poverty, migration, newspaper coverage gaps, racial or class exclusion, or non-publication. Do not overread without other evidence.
Misclassified manner of death. “Accidental” drowning, poisoning, or gunshot wounds, and deaths classified as “undetermined,” can conceal suicides. These classifications are reasons to seek corroborating records, not proof by themselves.
These phrases should guide your next search, not your conclusion.
Handling What You Find: Ethics and Sensitivity
The first distinction to keep clear is between recording, reporting, and publishing. Record the evidence in your private research files with full sourcing and detail. Report to a client or family member selectively. Publish to an online profile or shared database with the greatest restraint. Most genealogy software (RootsMagic, Legacy Family Tree, Family Tree Maker, Gramps) allows you to flag notes as private so they are excluded from exports and shared files.
A finding about manner of death is subject to the same evidentiary standard as any other genealogical conclusion. Under the Genealogical Proof Standard, a conclusion that an ancestor died by suicide requires a reasonably exhaustive search of relevant sources, accurate transcription and citation, thorough analysis and correlation of evidence, resolution of conflicting information, and a soundly reasoned written conclusion. A euphemism in an obituary is not proof. An absence from a burial register is not proof. A newspaper report attributing the death to “melancholy” is not proof of either the suicide or the motive. The GPS applies here the same way it applies everywhere else: you follow the evidence through the full process before stating a conclusion.
Historical suicides. As a general rule, a documented suicide before living memory is part of the historical record and can be documented openly. There is no ethical reason to suppress the existence of the finding. Report what the records say without editorializing about motive. The method should not be included unless it helps explain the record, resolves identity, or is necessary to the research question. Do not retroactively diagnose the deceased with any condition unless a contemporaneous record states it. Do not expand into a psychological reconstruction unless the client asked for it and the records support it. For client reports involving recent cases, it may be appropriate to cite a sensitive source but redact graphic details from the narrative, while preserving full documentation in private working notes.
A model sentence for a report: “The coroner’s jury found that [Name] died by suicide on [date]; no motive is stated in the surviving record.”
A model entry for a shared profile: “Died [date] in [place]. Further details in private research files.”
The twentieth-century cutoff is a guideline, not an absolute rule. The real question is whether living people are affected.
Recent suicides. When living family members are involved, stay within the agreed research scope, especially if the client did not ask for cause-of-death research.
If the death is within scope, include the finding in your report but give the client advance warning by phone or email before delivering the document. The finding still belongs in the written report if it is within scope; the point is that the first disclosure should not come when the client opens the document.
If the suicide is tangential and has no bearing on the research question, note it in your working files and leave it out.
Scope-of-work agreements. Professional genealogists working from a scope-of-work agreement should consider whether that agreement addresses how sensitive incidental findings are handled. A well-drafted agreement anticipates the possibility that research will uncover information the client did not expect and did not specifically request, and establishes in advance how such findings will be communicated. If your current agreement does not address this, the first encounter with a sensitive finding is a good reason to revise your template for future engagements.
Online trees and shared databases. An entry in a public tree is visible to anyone, including the deceased person’s children, grandchildren, stepchildren, adopted family members, spouses, or siblings. A small amount of unnecessary detail can do real harm. The people most affected by the entry may not be the person building the tree.
FamilySearch Family Tree is collaborative and public for deceased persons; any information you add, including notes, sources, and documents, is visible to others and editable by anyone. It is not the right place for sensitive manner-of-death details. Find a Grave memorials are also publicly visible. Do not copy graphic obituary language or manner-of-death information into either.
Be aware that attaching source documents to a profile can reveal the manner of death even when your fact fields are discreet. A newspaper clipping, coroner’s report, death certificate, or screenshot of any of these will be visible to anyone who clicks on the source. You can cite the source in your notes without attaching the graphic document itself.
Do not share sensitive death details in social media posts, family Facebook groups, or other forums where living relatives may be tagged without consent.
If a close living relative asks you to remove sensitive details from a profile you control, the ethical response is usually to remove or limit the public detail. On collaborative platforms where others can also edit, you may not be able to guarantee permanent removal.
For deaths involving minors or young people within living memory, exercise particular caution.
Talking to family members. Do not share unsolicited unless there is a clear medical, legal, or research reason. Give the first warning by phone or in person before the written report. Present the finding as a documented event, not as a scandal or family explanation.
Family health history. A large-scale Danish register-based study by Qin, Agerbo, and Mortensen found that first-degree relatives of people who died by suicide face a significantly elevated risk compared to the general population. Subsequent research has also supported familial clustering of suicide risk. A genealogist is not a physician; treat patterns as sensitive health history, not public genealogical trivia, and recommend that family members consult a medical professional.
Before You Publish: A Checklist
Is the person within living memory or close family memory?
Are close relatives, including non-biological family members, still alive?
Is the method necessary, or can it be omitted?
Is the source graphic, and can I cite it without attaching the graphic document?
Is this finding relevant to the research question?
Am I repeating a motive or diagnosis the records do not prove?
Would the way I am presenting this cause harm to a living person?
Sources and Resources
A note on AI tools: if you are using AI to summarize a coroner’s file, newspaper article, or other record, the cited source must be the original record, not the AI-generated summary.
Records
The Ancestor Hunt. (n.d.). Coroner records. https://theancestorhunt.com/coroner-records.html
Cook County Coroner’s Inquest Record Index, 1872-1911. Over 74,000 searchable records. Available through the Illinois State Archives.
FamilySearch. (n.d.). Catalog. Search by place name under “vital records” or keyword “coroner” for digitized inquest records. https://www.familysearch.org/search/catalog
Hait, M. (2013). Coroner’s inquests: An underused genealogical source. National Genealogical Society Quarterly, 101(4), 293-304.
Library of Congress. (n.d.). Chronicling America: Historic American newspapers. https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov
Missouri State Archives. (n.d.). Coroner’s Inquest Database. https://s1.sos.mo.gov/Records/Archives/ArchivesMVC/Coroners/
National Archives and Records Administration. (n.d.). Military records. https://www.archives.gov. Many records also available on Fold3.
National Association of Medical Examiners. (n.d.). https://www.thename.org
Newspapers.com and GenealogyBank. Subscription newspaper databases with coverage from the 1690s forward.
U.S. Census Bureau. (1850-1880). U.S. Census Mortality Schedules. Available on FamilySearch (free) and Ancestry (subscription).
Historical and Legal Background
Church of England General Synod. (2015). Draft Amending Canon No. 37 (GS 2076). Motion approved by General Synod, February 2015; Amending Canon promulgated July 2017.
FamilySearch. (n.d.). Poland church records. https://www.familysearch.org/en/wiki/Poland_Church_Records
FamilySearch. (n.d.). Russia church records. https://www.familysearch.org/en/wiki/Russia_Church_Records
Gates, B. T. (1988). Victorian suicide: Mad crimes and sad histories. Princeton University Press.
Goldberg, S. A. (1996). Crossing the Jabbok: Illness and death in Ashkenazi Judaism in sixteenth- through nineteenth-century Prague. University of California Press.
Gundacker, F. (n.d.). Laws and regulations of the Austrian Empire church registers. https://hrastovac.net/records-and-references/laws-and-regulations-of-the-austrian-empire-church-registers-by-f-gundacker/
Houston, R. A. (2010). Punishing the dead? Suicide, lordship, and community in Britain, 1500-1830. Oxford University Press.
MacDonald, M., & Murphy, T. R. (1990). Sleepless souls: Suicide in early modern England. Oxford University Press.
Miller, I. (2016). In the midst of life we are in death: Suicide coverage in the South during the Civil War era [Honors thesis, University of Richmond].
Nicodemus the Hagiorite & Agapius the Hieromonk (Eds.). (1800/1957). The Pedalion (Rudder). Orthodox Christian Education Society. (Original work published 1800). Canon XIV of Timothy, Archbishop of Alexandria, ratified by the Second Canon of the Sixth Ecumenical Synod, p. 898.
Phillips, D. P. (1974). The influence of suggestion on suicide: Substantive and theoretical implications of the Werther effect. American Sociological Review, 39(3), 340-354.
The Code of Canon Law. (1983). Canon 1184. The 1983 Code removed the bar on funerals for suicides in the 1917 Code (Canon 1240, §1, n. 3).
Qin, P., Agerbo, E., & Mortensen, P. B. (2002). Suicide risk in relation to family history of completed suicide and psychiatric disorders: A nested case-control study based on longitudinal registers. The Lancet, 360(9340), 1126-1130.
Suicide Act 1961, 9 & 10 Eliz. 2. c. 60. https://www.legislation.gov.uk
Tidemalm, D., Runeson, B., Waern, M., Frisell, T., Carlström, E., Lichtenstein, P., & Långström, N. (2011). Familial clustering of suicide risk: A total population study of 11.4 million individuals. Psychological Medicine, 41(12), 2527-2534.
Ethics, Professional Standards, and Reporting
Board for Certification of Genealogists. (2019). Genealogy standards (2nd ed.).
FamilySearch. (n.d.). Confidentiality and privacy when sharing. https://www.familysearch.org/en/wiki/Confidentiality_and_Privacy_When_Sharing
Reporting on Suicide. (n.d.). Recommendations for reporting on suicide. https://reportingonsuicide.org
In the United States, the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline is available 24/7. Call or text 988. Readers outside the U.S. should contact their local crisis line or emergency services.