If you clicked on this, you already know what it's about. But a big ol trigger warning anyway - don't read this if you're in a vunerable state and you feel that this may trigger you to want to harm yourself in any way.

So. Suicide. It's a big topic, huh. The scary stuff. People have been exploring it in fanfiction for years. And getting it so, so wrong.

But who am I to tell you what's wrong and what's right about portraying suicide? Do I really think I'm that important? Uh, well, I'm a suicide attempt survivor. I have been involved in the mental health recovery community and have friends who have attempted as well. Oh look, I even have my official certification!

Sorry for the dark humor, I'm trying to make some of this lighthearted because parts of this will be heavy, and show you that I'm not some random, inexperienced person telling you how suicidal characters should be written. But please remember that my experience is not the only experience or the inherently right one. Everyone experiences suicidality and mental illness in different ways, and none of those ways are "wrong."

The first mistake I see, the less serious one, comes from a lack of critical thinking and understanding of the reasons behind suicide. I see a lot of suicidal warriors characters whose suicidal thoughts boil down to "I want to die." The suicidal character will be hurting, and their inner monologue will be all about "I want to die because that will fix everything." And that makes no sense to me. These cats have a StarClan. They have a definite, tangible, inarguable afterlife. Medicine cats visit it, communicate with it. There's no uncertainty. What makes death seem like a good option when you're suicidal is that it's a way to end things. To get out of your situation. To stop hurting. Because it's the end. There's no afterlife, no definite one at least. When you're gone, you're gone. It's oblivion. But in a Clan setting, the existence of StarClan changes that. Dying doesn't end your character's situation and it doesn't offer any finality. Your character is just in StarClan feeling the same way they did before. Any reason causing their suicidal ideation still exists. There's no escape.

When characters are just going around parroting "I want to die" as their sole reason for wanting to kill themselves, it shows a lack of understanding of suicidal ideation. It's so much more than just wanting to die. Suicide is a deeply complex issue; its affected by systemic and societal issues, brought on by mental illness and life circumstance. Thoughts of "I want to die" are the way these issues are expressed. I'll take full accountability; I wrote a character just like this. Aubade in Sirens. She attempted suicide because she was sad about the state of the world or something? I can't even remember. And at the time, I thought that was an accurate portrayal because I was young and didn't understand suicide. All my knowledge of suicide was came down to "I want to die to escape this situation." Because that's what my suicidal thoughts were like at the time. We'll come back to this point.

So please, when you're writing a suicidal character, their reasoning should be deeper than wanting to drink escape a situation. Deeper than "I hate myself so I'm going to die to run away from myself." I see that one a lot. It doesn't work because they're literally just gonna wake up in StarClan, still with the same feelings and situation they had before. You need to understand the mental illness and background factors driving their suicidal thoughts. How does the world around them impact their mental health? Men are more likely to commit suicide, likely due to the culture we foster in the western world where men should not share their emotions, should not go to therapy. So they repress their shit until they burst. Misogyny, poverty, transphobia, homophobia, ableism. These societal factors have a huge impact on suicide. And while not all of this will be applicable to Warriors, it's important to understand these things, otherwise your portrayal comes off as shallow. Mental illness is impacted hugely by systemic and societal issues, and you should always take into account the culture and environment within your protagonist's Clan. You don't have to go too deep into this if you don't want to, but please don't go down the "I hate myself so I want to die route" because in a Clan setting it just doesn't work.

The bigger issue I see is over-dramatisation of suicidal ideation. I see these characters having constant breakdowns, screaming and crying, always on the edge of hurting themselves. You know, the ones who sound like all those edgy emo posts on instagram. These characters are a walking caricature of suicide; they're an emo twelve year old who's just found out the word depression for the first time and has made it their identity.  That's not what mental illness is like in most cases. It's not what being suicidal is like either. Sometimes people do going around screaming "I want to die." Sometimes their thoughts are constant suicidal mantras. But guess what? That's a mental health episode. It's not a constant. It's not the day to day life of someone with depression. Depression is usually quiet. You drag yourself through the day. You're not "birth is a curse and existence is a prison" all the time. Sometimes you are. But most of the time it's casual. It's a feeling of greyness, or numbness. A lot of the time suicidal thoughts aren't "oh my goood I'm in so much pain all I want to do is fling myself off a cliff." The majority of the time it's subtle. You drop a pencil and your brain goes "well that sucks. Go kill yourself."

I can already hear the comments of "akshually, I'm depressed and it really does feel like I'm in unbearable pain all the time and my brain is constantly screaming at me to die." As I said before, everyone experiences mental illness and suicidal thoughts differently. And I'm not here to invalidate you or tell you your experience is wrong. Because everyone's reality of mental illness is valid and real. But what I will say is when I was younger, that's what my mental illness felt like. And I wasn't suicidal. Not really. I thought I was. I had suicidal thoughts, sure. I was in "pure, unbearable agony, and all I wanted to do was end my life." All I can say to that is...why didn't I? Why did I never try? Why didn't I engage in any suicidal behaviours? Because I wasn't really suicidal. I was hurting and looking for ways to express that pain. Thinking about suicide was a way for me to prove to myself that I was hurting, that something was wrong. It was desperation and looking for a way out. It was a cry for help. I was that emo 12 year old who just learnt the word depression and made it my identity. That doesn't mean my experience was any less valid. It just means that I wasn't truly suicidal. I compare that me with last year me, when I was truly depressed and suicidal. It was much more subtle than the overdramatic characters I read in fics. I had mental health episodes where I did explode like some of these characters. Times when my parents had to call the crisis team on me. I had planned attempts too. But even then those were episodes, not a constant day to day life. Yes, those episodes can last a long time. This kind of portrayal is disrespectful and inaccurate to the majority of people struggling. There are people who are in long term mental health facilities because their day to day life is a crisis situation. Those people don't represent the majority of mental illness sufferers; they have severe long-term mental illness, and their condition is much more complex than "depression and suicidal." Usually there's trauma, ptsd, and bpd involved as well. Basically, if you are going to write a character who is always on the brink, you better research the hell out of it.

When I read suicidal characters who are in a constant meltdown, who go around crying about how tragic their poor little life is...it feels so fake. I just picture the author writing this for pity points. Sympathy. It's a piss poor way of getting readers to sympathize with your character, by writing tragedy porn. It feels exploitative and fetishising. Voyeurisyic, even. Like these authors are sitting there mocking suicidal people, taking our pain and our experiences and twisting a caricature out of it. It's like they're looking down at us and laughing about our lives. We're not a fucking circus.

You can write characters who are in a crisis, even a long term one, and have it still be an accurate portrayal. And that's the problem, the characters I see in most warriors fics aren't an accurate portrayal.

Most authors aren't doing this maliciously or intentionally. Most are young kids making a mistake with writing. Thinking making their character a walking tragedy is the only way to get readers to feel sorry for them. There's a popular fic on this site that I've had issues with for a long time. I won't name names because that won't do any good, I don't want to send hate on another author, and it's old. This fic had a character like what I described, and in one of their big crisis moments where they expressed they wanted to die, it was clearly a "oh, look at me, I'm hurting so badly please feel sorry for me!!!" And readers lap it up. Yay, sympathy points! All the comments are "oh, my heart is breaking, this poor character!!!" This is a technique authors do when they don't know how to write a compelling character.

So...how do you write a suicidal character in a Warriors fic? The easiest thing is to consider is how StarClan affects suicide. Ask yourself this: will my character's problems still exist if they go to StarClan? If so, then you've got to rethink some things.

Research, of course, is important. More than a list of symptoms. Listen to people with lived experience. Even if you yourself have been suicidal. Watch videos, talk to multiple people to compare and contrast their experiences  and perspectives. Even if you don't typically do a lot of research for fics and prefer to jump right in, do your research for this. If you enjoy writing just to write, without wanting to out in too much work, that's totally okay. But not in this circumstance, because you're writing about a very real and serious topic that many of your readers wouldve gone through. Why it's important to talk to a lot of people is because everyone has different experiences with suicide. I'm going to use some friends and myself as an example. This will be specific so major trigger warning for this part.

My friend attempted using the same method and same tool as I did one month after I attempted. She attempted twice in the same way and received hospital treatment the second time around. I didn't, though I ended up in hospital twice after my attempt because they misread my chart when I first came in and didn't give me the treatment I needed. We have similar experiences here, but things get very different after that. I was picked up by camhs, the public mental health system, and have been going to therapy for a year and a half under them. I was diagnosed with depression, social and generalised anxiety, and osfed, which was later rediagnosed as atypical anorexia. My friend was told she didn't have depression and wasn't picked up by the system. I have an eating disorder, she doesn't. I have depression, she doesn't. She has disassociation, I don't. She has a history of family issues that contribute to her mental health while I do. Her attempts were primarily triggered by immediate situations (on top of mental health issues) while mine were triggered by long term mental health problems.

You can see how our experiences with suicide are different, even though we attempted the same way and live in the same overall environment. That's why you need to talk to a range of people, or watch videos/read articles by a range of people, because people will tell you different things. People experience suicidality and exhibit symptoms in different ways.

I wanted to pop back in and edit something in real quick.

_creamtea_ makes a really important point here. A little bit was cut off so feel free to check out her comment! Your character doesn't have to be actively having breakdowns and making attempts to be suicidal. I've never seen a suicidal character in a warriors fic who doesn't attempt suicide. A large amount or even the majority of suicidal people have never attempted suicide, or have in the past and currently deal with suicidal thoughts and don't act on them. A huge issue with the way we view mental health is that we only see the extremes of it. We see people who are in a crisis, are hospitalised after multiple attempts. This extends for all mental illnesses. And this doesn't represent a large portion of people. A lot of people who struggle with mental illness are struggling badly but aren't acting on behaviours. That doesn't make their mental illness any less serious. As well as that, people who are actively engaging in behaviours and are in a crisis would theoretically be receiving a high level of care, even in a warriors fic. It would be a great portrayal to see a character struggling but not in a crisis. It would be very validating to people who are struggling and help shift the narrative that a person has to be in danger and at their worst to receive help.

Ed tw // This paragraph isn't applicable to Warriors fanfiction but is very important so if you're not interested you can skip it but I thought I should write about it anyway. The above point is really important because "the ambulance at the bottom of the cliff approach" is ineffective and viewing mental health only by the extreme cases worsens this problem. People should not have to be in danger to receive help from the mental health system. A suicidal person not acting on their urges is just as deserving and in need of help as someone who is attempting. The ambulance should not be at the bottom of the cliff, waiting for someone to fall. It should be at the top of the cliff; mental health services should be about prevention of mental illnesses worsening too. Media portraying mental health in extremes makes it so much harder for sufferers to get help. I've experienced this myself. When I was first diagnosed with an eating disorder, I was told and I quote "we will not offer you treatment until you lose more weight." That's very dangerous to say to someone with an ed, and real life proof that people are denied help based on the idea that their mental illnesses aren't seen as serious because they're not on their death bed. Sure, Warriors fanfiction won't have this big affect on the world and the mental health system, but portraying the less extreme or less visible side of mental illness may help change some people's minds, and that's makes a huge difference.

I didn't write this chapter to shame anyone who makes these mistakes. If you're reading this and you've written some of these issues, or you want to write a suicidal character but are scared of portraying it wrong, please don't be scared out of writing it! I'm not gonna show up to your house and beat you up if you make a mistake. I've done it. Everyone does it. Accept that you're going to make mistakes, apologise when you make them, fix them up, and learn from it. Obviously do your best to portray suicide in fics as correctly as you can, but please don't feel terrified all the time when writing or avoid writing suicidal characters out of fear. I don't want to scare you out of writing, and we want to be represented!

I hope this was helpful, and I know it's a little dark and serious but I tried to keep it light as possible.