This came up again recently, with a post from an apparently suicidal user. In this case, the problem was exacerbated by the post itself including profanity/cursing too, which is usually cleaned up using rude/abusive flags. While looking to see whether users should flag as rude/abusive then, I realized there is apparently no definitive guidance I can link users to that says 'here's what to do, nothing more, nothing less'.
Moderators have a moderator agreement policy on what to do as moderators: we can clean up the posts if needed and are supposed to escalate things to CMs. But this isn't applicable to regular users.
There used to be this post outlining a few things regular users can do (vote to close as off-topic, copy-paste comment, flag for a moderator to lock/delete), but it's closed as a duplicate of the moderator agreement policy. Besides that, there's another later written unofficial answer to that post now, listing a whole list of things not to do, including a vehement argument against copy-pasting comments. But that answer doesn't give any actionable guidance (like voting to close or flagging for a moderator to lock/delete) on what actually should be done instead then to handle these posts as soon as possible while minimizing any friction, so it's also not something I'd link someone asking me 'what should I do in this case' to.
So, that leaves me with a few questions:
- Where do I find official guidance I can link to regular users on what steps to take when encountering posts from apparently suicidal users?
- Is the guidance in the accepted answer to the original post still sufficient? If it's not sufficient, can we have new guidance, either edited into that accepted answer or in a new post, so I have one definitive official post to link regular users to?
