More than 700 people in the UK have posted on a pro-suicide website looking for someone to die with, a BBC investigation has found.
The site, which we are not naming, has a members-only section where users can look for a suicide partner.
We have connected several double suicides to the “partners thread”.
Our investigation also found that predators have used the site to target vulnerable women.
In December 2019, Angela Stevens’ 28-year-old son, Brett, travelled from his home in the Midlands to Scotland to meet a woman he had made contact with on the partners thread.
The pair rented an Airbnb and took their lives together.
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Since her son’s death, she has spent years researching the pro-suicide site - in particular, the partners thread.
“It’s a very dangerous place,” Angela says.
She compares it to a dark version of a dating app.
“Where else would you go to find a partner to take your own life with?” she says. “It’s just absolutely vile.”
The thread encourages users to end their own lives - and offers instructions on how to do it.
Of course the government’s answer is to try and ban it, rather than solve the underlying cause of people wanting to use it in the first place.
This isn’t anything new, it’s been happening since the days of usenet being popular.
Reducing suicide is always approached as trying to block pathways to death, rather than by improving life.
As always with this country it’s putting a plaster over the symptoms rather than addressing the cause.
Well, I’d never heard of it before now.
You’ve heard of Romeo and Juliet?
Pretty sure they didn’t hook up to die.