“It is a selfish thing to do”

This one is usually said in pain. It comes out of grief, or fury, or from somebody who has spent years frightened for a person and has run out of other words. It is not usually said to wound.

It is still wrong about the mechanism, and it is heard by people who are still alive and still deciding.

What people in that state actually report

The consistent finding — from research, from crisis lines, from people who have survived attempts — is close to the opposite of selfishness.

Perceived burdensomeness is one of the most reliably reported features of suicidal thinking: a settled belief that one's existence is a net cost to the people around them, and that they would be relieved, eventually, if it stopped.

That belief is false. It is also, to the person holding it, not an opinion but a plain fact about the world — as obvious as the floor. From inside it does not feel like giving up on people. It feels like doing them a favour at great personal cost.

You can call that a catastrophic distortion. It is not self-interest.

Why the framing does harm

It is heard by the wrong audience. Said at a funeral, in a sermon, in a comment thread, it reaches people currently having these thoughts — and it confirms, rather than challenges, the belief that they are a burden whose feelings are an imposition.

It makes disclosure more expensive. Someone weighing up telling a relative has now heard that relative's view of people who feel this way.

It gets in the way of grief. Bereaved people who half-believe it end up angry at somebody they are also mourning, and ashamed of the anger. If someone has died by suicide →

The anger underneath it is legitimate

Worth saying clearly, because "that's a harmful thing to say" is not a sufficient answer to someone who is devastated.

People left behind are frequently furious. That is a normal part of this particular bereavement, it does not make anyone a bad person, and it usually coexists with love rather than replacing it. Anger at what happened is not the same as a claim about why it happened.

The distinction worth holding: I am angry about this is true and yours to feel. They were being selfish is a claim about their state of mind, and it is not what the evidence describes.

If you are the one being called selfish

Someone may have said it to you, or you may have said it to yourself.

The thought that people would be better off is a symptom. It arrives with depression, it recedes when depression recedes, and people who recover consistently describe it afterwards as something they believed completely and which turned out to be untrue.

It is not evidence about your worth. It is evidence about how ill you are.