30 things to try before you try suicide

Published September 2, 2025 in Mental Health - 6 mins to read

I recently read a piece on Substack called “30 things to try before you try suicide” (clearly the algorithm already has me pegged).¹ I… did not think it was very good. It was aggressively inoffensive and uncontroversial, and seriously misjudged the seriousness of suicidality.

If there’s a sliver of a chance that it stops someone from killing themselves, then I don’t give a fuck about offending a myriad others. So I came up with my own list of 30 things, which have a much higher chance of success than “have hobbies” and “don’t be a hater”.

I am not necessarily advising you do these things. Many are illegal, and many more are risky-by-design. If you’re in a state where you’re seriously considering killing yourself, you’re liable to underestimate these risks. They are derived from my own experiences of staring into the abyss and what has worked for me. I’ve done some, but not all, of the items on the list.

My thesis here is that many people kill themselves because they feel trapped, and cannot emotionally connect with a future in which they are not ensnared. Often the trap is more psychic than real. The actions below are intended to be radical or intense - designed to unstick a person, but only if they’re novel. If you have done any of these things recently (or ever, in some cases), then repeating them is not going to have the desired effect.

(NB: these are loosely grouped by theme, rather than in a proscribed order. You should prioritise the list yourself.)

Quit your job. Ask your doctor to sign you off sick due to your suicidal ideation. At the very least, take a sabbatical.
Tell someone you’re going to kill yourself. Tell many people. (Tell me, if you’d like).
Take drugs. Some will make you feel good, helping you remember how that feeling tastes, so you can find your way back without the chemical aids. Others will change your entire world, for a few hours - clearly your perception is malleable, and so you can alter it yourself. A bad trip is still better than a trip down the River Styx.
Cut your family off, or any toxic friends. You owe yourself more than you do anyone else. ²
Break up with your partner.
Try skydiving. During free-fall, evaluate the merits of not pulling the parachute.
Go too fast - bicycle, motorcycle, car, skis, whatever. Take extreme care to ensure that you are not putting anyone else at risk in doing so.
Go caving. Penetrate Gaia.
Engineer a situation where you feel genuine, embodied fear. Hold yourself in fight-or-flight. This is how you will feel in your final moments. Ask yourself whether your convictions to end it all remain. If not, accept that you must do whatever it takes to change your situation, no matter how intimidating or overwhelming. You’re stronger than you think.
If you’re outdoors-y, push your limits; do some sketchy scrambling/climbing or a multi-day hike with as little gear as possible.
Scream - into a pillow or on top of a mountain or anywhere else that feels safe to do so. If it feels forced at first, keep practicing until it feels uninhibited.
Try ecstatic dance. Writhe, flail, gyrate.
Go on a long hiking/camping trip alone.
Spend two hours in a sensory deprivation tank (or more, if they’ll let you).
Sit by the sea at night, and contemplate the vastness of the ocean. Look to the sky, and marvel that the stars are so many orders of magnitude bigger than the oceans, a thing whose size you already can’t comprehend. Swim naked. Feel how small and helpless you are compared to the absurd enormity of the universe. Contemplate drowning.
Use the services of a sex worker. Penetrate Gaia?³
Go to a man’s circle, if you’re a man.
Go to church.
Hold a baby. Make sure to get the owner’s permission first.
Play with a dog. Even better, look after a friend’s for a few days.
Tell the people you love that you love them, even if you’ve never told them before. Make sure to explicitly use the phrase “I love you”.
Go to a concert. Go to a protest. Be part of something bigger than yourself. Feel swept up in the energy around you.
Admit yourself to a psychiatric ward.⁴
Book a one-way flight to somewhere, anywhere. Don’t have a plan past that. Improvise and realise that you are more capable than you thought.
Move city. Some places just have bad vibes.
Find a way to live an analogue life for at least a week.
Shoplift from a chain grocery store.⁵
Sneak around a construction site at night.
Go on a cruise.⁶
Go to the most naturally beautiful place you can readily go to. Travel for this, fly if you need to - just go there and bask.

I recently pulled myself out of the worst depressive episode I’ve had since the beginning of the pandemic, in large part by doing several things on this list. At one point I told one of my friends that I was seriously thinking about killing myself, and they produced a list of progressively more ridiculous things they demanded I try before resorting to suicide. This is for them.

Given that I’m ~dunking on it, I’m not going to link it, but it’s easy enough to find - the title of the post is the same as this one. ↩︎
Unless you have children. ↩︎
Do a large amount of due diligence beforehand. Don’t compromise your morals, but don’t feel ashamed either. ↩︎
I can understand having reservations about this one; my experience of this was much better than I’d feared from depictions in pop culture. Fortunately it’s not the 70s anymore, and we actually have quite good psychiatric care now. ↩︎
Large chain grocers expect to lose 2-4% of their stock due to “shrink”, of which ~one-third is due to customer theft. I think this is pretty close to a victimless crime on first-order effects alone (there’s an appreciable chance that the items stolen wouldn’t have been sold anyway, and asymmetric distribution of the value of the sale means that the loss is primarily sustained by those for whom it’s a negligible amount of money). I do, however, think shoplifting is extremely bad for decision-theoretic reasons. Even if one person shoplifting is ~fine, everyone shoplifting is obviously terrible, therefore the one person shouldn’t shoplift. ↩︎
If I’m being honest, this one doesn’t appeal to me, but it’s the canonically done thing if you have a terminal illness, so presumably there’s something to it. ↩︎