A BBC investigation has found that a website described as “pro-suicide” has allowed more than 700 people to find a “partner” to kill themselves with.
To avoid encouraging its use, the broadcaster has not named the site. It apparently has a private section for site members who want to look for a “suicide partner.” Unsurprisingly, the investigation found evidence that predatory people have used that section of the site to target distressed and vulnerable women.
Grieving mother Angela Stevens said her then-28-year-old son Brett used the site to find his suicide partner and went to Scotland to meet the woman. They then rented a home to stay in and killed themselves together. Recalling her son’s smile and “infectious laugh,” Stevens said the site is a “very dangerous place.” Stevens has been haunted by the site and has researched it since her son’s death, describing it as a kind of dark parody of a dating website.
According to the BBC investigation, the site’s thread for “partners” actively encourages people to kill themselves, complete with instructions. More than 5,000 people have posted on the thread from around the world, and the BBC believes that about 130 Britons have taken their lives by using an unnamed chemical recommended by the site.
The suicide site is reminiscent of other dark internet watering holes such as so-called “pro-ana” websites. These sites first came to prominence in the 1990s and offered an online world where troubled girls and young women were encouraged in their delusion that they were hopelessly fat. Instructions on dieting and achieving dangerously low body weight were plentiful.
Today, there’s a growing problem of something that sounds so dark as to be unbelievable: “pro-anorexia” life coaches.
BBC investigators created an anonymous user account for the suicide site in order to get access and analyze the numbers of people using it, as well as to understand what they were expressing. This led to contact with devastated family members whose loved ones, they say, were encouraged by the site to kill themselves and were “helped” along by the site’s explicit instructions.
One user who found her death partner through the site was named Linda, and her sister, Helen Kite, joined the site looking for a partner last year. She found one in a man who agreed to meet her in a London hotel where both took a fatal drug and ended their lives in July, 2023.
Helen Kite said the site takes advantage of “desperate souls.”
If you are in the United States and struggling with despair and thoughts of suicide, volunteers at the 988 helpline are available around the clock to talk and offer support.
