At some point — at a family dinner, in a comments section, from a well-meaning colleague — you'll hear something about suicide that is wrong. Not just insensitive. Factually wrong.
And it will make your grief harder, because the myths don't just misunderstand suicide. They misunderstand the person you lost. And by extension, they misunderstand you.
The most common myths are below. Not to make you angry — though they might — but so that when someone says something ignorant, you know they're wrong. Even if you don't have the energy to correct them.
**"It was selfish."**
This is the one that does the most damage. And it gets the reality almost exactly backwards. What we know is that people in a suicidal crisis often believe they are a burden — that the people they love would be better off without them. The decision to die isn't driven by selfishness. It's driven by a distorted belief that their existence is causing harm. That distortion is part of the crisis, not a reflection of reality.
The person you lost was not selfish. They were in a kind of pain that made them believe their death would be a kindness to others. That belief was wrong. But it was real to them.
**"You should have seen the signs."**
As *You couldn't have predicted this* explains in detail: even trained professionals cannot reliably predict suicide. The signs are almost always only visible in hindsight, when you already know the ending and can read everything backwards toward it. Expecting a friend, a parent, a partner to see what psychiatrists routinely miss is not just unfair — it's factually wrong.
If someone says this to you, they're telling you more about their own fear — "I need to believe signs are visible, because I need to believe this can't happen to me" — than about your situation.
**"They didn't really want to die."**
This one is complicated, because there's a grain of truth in it — and that grain makes it both more useful and more dangerous than the other myths.
Most people who die by suicide aren't set on dying. They're caught between wanting the pain to stop and not wanting to be dead. This comes up again and again. Many people who survive serious attempts describe not wanting to die but being unable to see any other way to stop the pain. In that sense, the statement contains something real: the desire was often to end the suffering, not to end the life.
But when someone says this to a bereaved person, it can feel like minimisation. As if the death wasn't real enough, wasn't committed enough, wasn't serious. The person you lost is dead. Whatever ambivalence existed before the act, the outcome was final. Honouring the complexity doesn't require dismissing the reality.
**"It was a cry for help."**
A "cry for help" implies performance — that the person didn't really mean it, that they were trying to get attention. This framing is damaging because it reduces a moment of extreme crisis to a manipulative act.
Some people do make attempts that are not intended to be fatal — where the intent is different from what happened. But applying this label after someone has died is retroactive, speculative, and cruel. The person you lost did die. Calling it a cry for help doesn't honour the severity of what happened.
**"They're in a better place."**
This is meant as comfort. It can feel like erasure. Whether you hold spiritual beliefs or not, being told that the person who left you — who chose to leave, who caused this devastation — is now in a "better place" can feel like a dismissal of your pain. It can feel like the person saying it values the dead person's peace over the living person's agony.
You don't have to be grateful for this. You don't have to respond. A tight smile and a subject change is a complete response to a platitude that wasn't asked for.