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Sanctioned Suicide

Internet forum for suicide discussion

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General referenceInterpretive dossier study · Crown Archives visual atlas
Record originEnglish Wikipedia
Text licenseCC BY-SA 4.0
Source revisionSep 22, 2026
Entity authorityQ110972973 ↗
Source-derived summary

Sanctioned Suicide (SS, or SaSu) is an internet forum known for its open discussion and encouragement of suicide and suicide methods. The forum was founded on March 18, 2018, by Diego Joaquín Galante and Lamarcus Small, who go by the online pseudonyms Serge and Marquis. Galante and Small created the website after the subreddit r/SanctionedSuicide was banned by Reddit; both the website and the subreddit have been described as the successors to the Usenet newsgroup alt.suicide.holiday. As of November 2024, the forum has over 50,000 members and was reported to receive nearly 10 million page views in September 2023. Although the forum describes itself as a "pro-choice" suicide forum, it has been widely called "pro-suicide".

Sanctioned Suicide has generated widespread scrutiny from news outlets and government officials for the encouragement of suicide by members on the site, as well as the site's promotion of the use of sodium nitrite as a method of suicide, a previously obscure method. One New York Times report found 45 adults and children who died in connection to the site, and a later report found dozens more. BBC News has identified 50 people who died in connection to the site in the United Kingdom. Access to the forum has been restricted in Italy and Germany. Since November 2023, Turkey also blocked access to the site.

Editorial summary

Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Sanctioned Suicide” is internet forum for suicide discussion. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Sanctioned, Suicide and Internet, not as a finished interpretation.

Editorial reviewA concise reference frame for defining the subject, testing terminology and identifying the institution closest to the evidence. The current lead gives the account dated anchors—2018, 2024, 2023—that can be checked directly. The linked authority record independently contributes the date 2018-03-18. For this dossier, Sanctioned, Suicide and Internet is the immediate research focus.
Editorial analysis

Why this record matters

The phrase “internet forum for suicide discussion” supplies a clear boundary for inquiry. It also exposes the unanswered questions: who defined that boundary, when it became stable and which sources sit outside it.

Evidence profile

The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 22, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q110972973. 1 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 2 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 2018, 2024 and 2023.

Critical limits

Overview language is designed for orientation and should not be treated as a substitute for the evidence cited beneath it. The source lead contains qualifying language; that uncertainty should survive quotation, summary and reuse. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.

How to read it

Use the entry as an orientation point, then follow its citations and revision history. Names, dates and institutional relationships should be checked against the original record.

Best used for
  • Subject orientation
  • Search vocabulary
  • Locating named sources
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The closest primary source, responsible institution and strongest cited specialist reference.

Three-step research path

  1. Establish the record: confirm the title “Sanctioned Suicide”, its source revision and the description used here.
  2. Expand the search: follow Sanctioned Suicide primary sources, Sanctioned Suicide archive and Sanctioned research across catalogues and specialist indexes.
  3. Test the account: compare the strongest cited source with the responsible institution’s current record and note any disagreement.

Questions for further research

  1. Which source most directly establishes the central claim about “Sanctioned Suicide”?
  2. Which cited source is closest to the event, object or claim?
  3. What terminology or title could unlock a more precise catalogue search?
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Source & attribution

This entry incorporates text from “Sanctioned Suicide” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.