None of this is about being delicate, and it is not a list of words you are in trouble for using. Almost everyone has said at least one of these, usually while trying to be kind. The reason it matters is narrower and more practical than politeness: some phrasings make it measurably harder for the person hearing them to ask for help.
If you have used one of these, nothing bad has happened. Use a different one next time.
Instead of
Committed suicide
Try
Died by suicide · took their own life · ended their life
You commit a crime, or a sin. It stopped being a crime in England and Wales in 1961, and the phrasing carries the whole weight of the time when it was one. Families bereaved by suicide report this one wounding them more than any other.
Instead of
Successful suicide · failed attempt
Try
Died by suicide · survived an attempt · non-fatal attempt
It frames dying as the success and surviving as the failure. Said to someone who survived, it is close to unbearable, and it is said to them constantly.
Instead of
A cry for help · attention-seeking
Try
They were in real distress
It implies the person did not mean it and was performing. People who are dismissed this way learn not to tell anyone next time, and prior attempts are among the strongest predictors of a later death.
Instead of
A selfish act
Try
They could not see another way out
Almost nobody who dies by suicide believes they are taking something from the people they love. Overwhelmingly they believe they are removing a burden. Calling it selfish is both untrue and precisely the belief that keeps someone from asking for help.
Instead of
Suicide epidemic · spiralling rates
Try
Rates have risen by X since Y
Epidemic framing makes suicide sound contagious and unstoppable, which increases the sense of inevitability in the reader least able to afford it. A number and a date carry the same information without the fatalism.
Instead of
Suicide victim
Try
A person who died by suicide
Victim implies something done to them by an outside force, and quietly removes the person.
Instead of
Just a phase · they'll grow out of it
Try
This is real and it is happening now
Whether or not it passes has no bearing on whether it is dangerous today.
Do not describe how somebody died. Not the means, not the place, not the details, not "at least it was quick". This is the single most replicated finding in the whole field: method detail in circulation is followed by a measurable rise in deaths by that method, and the effect is strongest among people who were already struggling.
It is also the one rule on this site with no exceptions, which is why you will not find that detail anywhere here — including in our statistics, and including in stories people have sent us themselves.
Ask the plain question: "Are you thinking about suicide?" Asking does not put the idea in anybody's head — that belief is widespread, wrong, and responsible for an enormous number of conversations that never happened.
What to avoid is the version that tells the person you cannot cope with a yes: "you're not thinking of doing anything stupid, are you?" leaves them nowhere to go.
Wording you can use, if you want it ready-made.
Journalists, teachers, employers and anyone posting online: include a helpline, describe the person rather than the death, avoid presenting suicide as a response to a single cause, and never treat it as an understandable solution to a bad situation.
Samaritans publishes free media guidelines that go much further than this page, and they are worth reading before you publish anything.
Every other page on this site is scanned before publication and rejected if it contains the phrasings above. This one carries an explicit exemption, because you cannot advise against a phrase without writing it. The exemption is per page and per category — it lets this page quote stigmatising language, and it still cannot let anything through about method. How that check works.