I have heard rumor that most people who attempt suicide and fail, regret it.
After doing some research on this, I think this is unlikely to be true. The only quantitative study I found says that among its sample of suicide attempt survivors, 35.6% are glad to have survived, while 42.7% feel ambivalent, and 21.6% regret having survived. I also found a couple of sources agreeing with your “rumor”, but one cited just a suicide awareness trainer as its source, while the other cited the above study as the only evidence for its claim, somehow interpreting it as “Previous research has found that more than half of suicidal attempters regret their suicidal actions.” (Gemini 2.5 Pro says “It appears the authors of the 2023 paper misinterpreted or misremembered the findings of the 2005 study they cited.”)
If this “rumor” was true, I would expect to see a lot of studies supporting it, because such studies are easy to do and the result would be highly useful for people trying to prevent suicides (i.e., they can use it to convince potential suicide attempters that they’re likely to regret it). Evidence to the contrary are likely to be suppressed or not gathered in the first place, as almost nobody wants to encourage suicides. (The above study gathered the data incidentally, for a different purpose.) So everything seems consistent with the “rumor” being false.
Interesting, thanks. I think I had heard the rumor before and believed it.
In the linked study, it looks like they asked the people about regret very shortly after the suicide attempt. This could both bias the results towards less regret to have survived (little time to change their mind) or more regret to have survived (people might be scared to signal intent to retry suicide, for fear of being committed, which I think sometimes happens soon after failed attempts).
After doing some research on this, I think this is unlikely to be true. The only quantitative study I found says that among its sample of suicide attempt survivors, 35.6% are glad to have survived, while 42.7% feel ambivalent, and 21.6% regret having survived. I also found a couple of sources agreeing with your “rumor”, but one cited just a suicide awareness trainer as its source, while the other cited the above study as the only evidence for its claim, somehow interpreting it as “Previous research has found that more than half of suicidal attempters regret their suicidal actions.” (Gemini 2.5 Pro says “It appears the authors of the 2023 paper misinterpreted or misremembered the findings of the 2005 study they cited.”)
If this “rumor” was true, I would expect to see a lot of studies supporting it, because such studies are easy to do and the result would be highly useful for people trying to prevent suicides (i.e., they can use it to convince potential suicide attempters that they’re likely to regret it). Evidence to the contrary are likely to be suppressed or not gathered in the first place, as almost nobody wants to encourage suicides. (The above study gathered the data incidentally, for a different purpose.) So everything seems consistent with the “rumor” being false.
Interesting, thanks. I think I had heard the rumor before and believed it.
In the linked study, it looks like they asked the people about regret very shortly after the suicide attempt. This could both bias the results towards less regret to have survived (little time to change their mind) or more regret to have survived (people might be scared to signal intent to retry suicide, for fear of being committed, which I think sometimes happens soon after failed attempts).