Astaroth
[*screaming into the void intensifies*]
Original poster
STAFF MEMBER
DONATING MEMBER
FOLKLORE MEMBER
- Invitation Status
- Not accepting invites at this time
- Posting Speed
- Speed of Light
- Slow As Molasses
- Online Availability
- It varies a lot depending on my schedule, unfortunately.
- Writing Levels
- Advanced
- Adaptable
- Preferred Character Gender
- Primarily Prefer Male
- Genres
- Psychological horror
Body horror
Supernatural
Giallo
Splatterpunk
Dark fantasy
Historical
Low fantasy
Magipunk
Weird West
Noir
Thriller
Gothic horror
Southern Gothic
Gaslamp fantasy
Cyberpunk
Space saga
Clockpunk
Space Western
Space opera
Paranormal
Modern fantasy
Dieselpunk
Post-Apocalyptic
Crime drama
Medieval fantasy
How strict is this? I get that, say, posting a suicide note wouldn't be allowed, but say someone posted a thread in counseling asking for help with self-harm, and said something implying/stating that they'll probably/will self-harm again? What about images of cutting scars, burn marks, or the like? Would they just need to be in spoilers? What if it was an image of a fresh or still bleeding cut?
Someone posting about their issues with self-harm or depression is fine, including indicating that suicidal ideation or self-harm is an on-going problem.
Posting saying they are thinking of imminently committing suicide or self-harm is NOT allowed.
While suicide is not illegal in the U.S. (which is where we have to worry about, since that's the location of our server), and so does not include the legal issues that threats of violence against others entails, there are nonetheless a lot of issues inherent in allowing discussion of imminent or explicit intent to commit suicide and self-harm. It's indicative of serious issues that our Staff and our users are not equipped to handle, and in some cases may be fraudulent and tantamount to trolling (though the desired emotion to evoke is different).
Some of the issues can include:
- Users giving misguided or even harmful armchair advice to people suffering from mental illness, which they are not trained to give.
- Users encouraging individuals to commit acts of self-harm or suicide.
- Users making threats of suicide or self-harm in order to garner attention and sympathy, or to manipulate the user base to perceive them in a certain way.
- Fake suicides in order to hurt members of the community and/or escape a negative reputation associated with an account.
A thread where someone was posting pictures of self-harm would be a difficult area to rule on and would depend largely on the context of the thread. Just posting images of cutting scars or burns would not necessarily be a problem, but there are some issues where we DO have to rule case-by-case and you've landed on one.
As to whether they'd need to be in spoilers, probably not unless they were extremely gory/contained a lot of blood, and once again that would fall into "put it in spoilers only if you think it should be in spoilers, but if you don't and it gets reported, we'll ask you to put it in spoilers".