“Naming it keeps people safe”

It feels obvious: if a forum or a group online is encouraging people to die, surely the responsible thing is to name it loudly, so parents, teachers and friends know exactly what to watch for and can warn others away from it.

That is the opposite of what suicide-prevention guidance recommends, and it is worth being explicit about why, because the instinct behind it is a good one.

What naming a harmful site actually does

A name is searchable. The moment a harmful site is named in a news article, a social media post, a school newsletter or a well-meaning warning shared in a parents' group, anyone who reads it now has everything they need to find that site in seconds — including, and especially, the person the warning was written for. Someone already in the state of mind these communities exploit does not need the site described to them; they need a search term, and a warning provides one for free.

This is not a hypothetical risk weighed against a hypothetical benefit. It is the specific, well-documented reason that Samaritans' own guidance for journalists tells them to avoid mentioning or linking to comments, websites or forums that promote or glamorise suicide, and to avoid signposting vulnerable people toward them even while warning about them. If professional guidance written for people whose job is public communication says not to name these sites, an individual social media post is not a safer place to do it. Even an "informational" post describing what a harmful site contains, written with the best intentions, can raise that site's profile rather than reduce it.

Why this feels wrong, and why it still holds

The instinct to name it comes from a good place — a parent who found something terrifying wants other parents to be able to recognise the same warning signs, and naming feels like the most direct way to do that. The uncomfortable truth is that recognising warning signs and naming a specific site are two different jobs, and the first does not require the second.

You can tell another parent what to watch for — a young person suddenly secretive about their screen, withdrawn, talking about their situation as fixed and unchangeable, going quiet with people who used to know everything — without ever naming a specific site. That description is genuinely useful and it carries none of the risk a name does.

What this site does instead

This is also why nothing on this site names any specific pro-suicide forum, site or community, anywhere, ever — including the ones that have been the subject of news coverage and regulatory action. Referring to "a pro-suicide forum" or "sites like that" costs nothing in usefulness and removes the one thing that would turn a page meant to help into a page that also functions as a discovery route.

If you have found such a site and want to report it → · When your child is in a harmful online community →