Telling someone to kill themself. If done as a joke, this is usually played for Black Comedy or Comedic Sociopathy, although some stories take the time to explore the serious effects it may have on the targets. If called out on this, expect a "Just Joking" Justification.
If the character is seriously trying to convince another character to kill themself, this may be Murder by Suicide.
Leave Behind a Pistol is similar, but done with different intent. Compare Go, Ye Heroes, Go and Die, which does this by accident (normally). See also Why Won't You Die?, which usually involves frustration that the listener wasn't killed by someone else, and Ordered to Die, where the commander expects to be obeyed. Contrast Talking Down the Suicidal. Compare and contrast Suicide for Others' Happiness, when a character believes other people would be better off with them out of the picture. Also contrast Stop, or I Shoot Myself!, where someone threatens to kill themselves if they don't get what they want.
Truth in Television, and often goes hand-in-hand with bullying and, these days, Cyberbullying. In many jurisdictions, deliberately inciting someone into suicide is an extremely serious crime that carries penalties similar to manslaughter or even premeditated homicide. However, real life examples are not needed for this page.
Examples:
- In the infamous advertisement for Crash Bandicoot 2: Cortex Strikes Back, Crash claims that Cortex went to a self-help seminar and is now willing to help him out. What did Crash tell him in response?
Crash: Why don't you take a twelve-step program off a ten-step pier?
- In Arigatou, the patriarch of the manga's focus family invokes a Tough Love version of this. When his eldest daughter Shouko admits that she wants to die and stops going to school without ever saying why ( earlier in the story, Akiko was gang-raped and was left mentally fragile as a result), he gives her a knife and tells her to slit her wrist if the pain she's feeling is that unbearable that she's lost the will to live. What he didn't expect is that she took his offer seriously, and cut her arm down to the arteries.
- Code Geass, first season episode 22: After Lelouch's Geass turns on without his consent while he's talking to his sister, Princess Euphemia li Britannia, about his power to make people obey any one command of his, while he's using "what if I told you to kill all the Japanese" as an example, Euphemia's mind is overwritten with an order to to precisely that. She then heads out into the stadium where she was in talks to turn Japan from a Britannian colony into its own government, and changes course and commands all the Japanese to kill themselves. When they're not persuaded, she shoots one of them herself and orders her troops to carry out the rest.
- In the second episode of Durarara!! Izaya Orihara talks a girl into committing suicide using what can only be described as reverse reverse psychology.
- The titular character of Frieren: Beyond Journey's End does this to Aura through a Psychic-Assisted Suicide after Aura's Compelling Voice is turned against her.
- Mobile Suit Gundam Wing: Endless Waltz: Heero, upon confronting Wufei fighting for the Mariemaia Army, tells him to trigger his suit's self-detonation. While ambiguous in the original as to whether it's a straight suicide dare or Heero means he should only blow up the suit, the moment is often-referenced in Super Robot Wars without its original context, where it is more blatantly a Suicide Dare.
- In Monster (1994), Johan does this to several characters, most notably when he teaches kids to balance themselves on guardrails as a "game".
- My Hero Academia: In the very first chapter, Bakugo tells his former-childhood-friend-and-now-target-of-his-bullying Midoriya that, if he doesn't have a Quirk like everybody else, why doesn't he stop wasting everybody's time and just jump off the school's roof and see if he gets powers in a new life? That said, the author, Kohei Horikoshi, has stated in a interview that he considers this scene an Old Shame, due to how it paints Bakugo as way more toxic than he intended.
- In The Summer You Were There, Shizuku ends up getting a flood of abuse after her web novel inadvertently resembles an actual news story about a suicide, and one of the comments is simply "kys", or "kill yourself." The worst part is that Shizuku ended up actually contemplating suicide, and would have gone through with it if not for Kaori.
- The Tekkonkinkreet quote at the top of the page. A rare example of a character not meaning this seriously.
- Doctor Who: The Eighth Doctor Adventures: The Grand Finale of The Eighth Doctor and Lucie Miller sees the Monk help the Daleks conquer Earth by spreading a deadly virus across the planet, and preventing the Doctor from stopping it. Though he escapes being sucked inside a time warp, like the Daleks, and saves the Doctor and Susan, he receives a telling off from the Doctor. The Doctor bemoans that the Monk didn't do the universe a favour by jumping inside the time warp, dying by suicide; if he did, the Doctor might have been prepared to forgive him.
- Played for dark humour by Bill Hicks when he encourages any marketing professionals
in the audience to kill themselves.
- One of Rodney Dangerfield's "I don't get no respect" jokes: "I told Dr. Vinnie Boombatz I want to stop aging. He gave me a gun."
- Avengers: The Kree/Skrull War: While held captive on Hala by Ronan, Rick Jones tries to infuriate Ronan into killing him, essentially committing Suicide by Accuser. Ronan doesn't bite, and just has Rick thrown in a nearby cupboard.
- Captain America once defeated the Super-Adaptoid — who was at that time nigh-omnipotent thanks to a Cosmic McGuffin — by convincing it that the thing that kept it from equaling his "human spirit" was that it could not die. The Adaptoid proceeded to prove Cap wrong by dying on the spot, thereby ending its threat.
- In Alan Moore's Captain Britain series, the sentient computer Mastermind once used holographic illusions of the Captain's dead parents who almost successfully urged him to kill himself out of guilt at their deaths.
- Daredevil once gave Bullseye a big "The Reason You Suck" Speech about how the only reason he keeps coming back is because he wants DD to kill him since he's too much of a coward to do it himself, but that he won't give him that satisfaction, instead opting to carve Bullseye's own logo, very painfully, into the man's forehead, so that when the time comes that he realizes how meaningless and insignificant he is, he can use it to, in Daredevil's words, "aim true. Aim to kill". And in the non-canonical Distant Finale story, Daredevil: End of Days, Bullseye takes his advice.
- This is how the Great Lakes Avengers defeat Maelstrom in their miniseries: Mr. Immortal convinces the villain that life isn't worth living, and "goes first" to cap his argument, prompting said villain to blast their own head off.
- Judge Dredd: One issue had Judge Dredd investigating why a well-known radio DJ shoved himself into a garbage disposal without warning. It turned out that, following a head injury, the DJ could hear all of the nasty thoughts of his callers and listeners telling him to snuff it for being so obnoxious.
- Ms. Marvel: It is revealed that the selfish, amoral psychologist and psychiatrist Dr. Karla Sofen (AKA Moonstone) convinced depressed patients to kill themselves while she watched.
- D-list villain Whirlwind verbally demoralized Hank Pym to the point that Hank put a gun to his head in a once-controversial West Coast Avengers storyline. Only another superhero interrupting Hank prevented it from being a successful attempt.
- Played for Laughs in Dilbert in a strip where the boss is showing a new employee around, and asks Dilbert to show her the ropes. Dilbert shows her a noose. The last panel after completing Dilbert's tour of working at Incompetence, Inc. has her readying to hang herself.
- Pearls Before Swine: In one set of episodes, Rat takes a job as a late night radio show host, which means that he gets to listen to people call in to say that they were abducted by aliens and things like that. One such person calls from his truck to say that aliens took his brain. Rat responds by saying that since the aliens took his brain because he's a smart fellow, that they'll want the rest of his organs for military use and he must not let that happen. The caller panics and asks what should he do. Rat tells him to drive off a cliff. The caller does it, and lets out an "AAAaaahhh" as he falls. One staff member points out the F.C.C. frowns on killing listeners and Rat says "Rules, rules, rules." This one is Played for Laughs.
- Played for Laughs in The Wizard of Id. The Friar comes across a crowd of people chanting, "Jump! Jump! Jump!" at a suicidal man on a ledge.
Friar: What's the matter with you people? Can't you see this poor man needs help?
Crowd: Push him! Push him! Push him!
Crossovers
- Adventures of a Line Hopper: As a child, Seo often hears voices in her head (which she assumes to be her conscience but is actually Twilight needing her to die so it can take over her body) who keep telling her that she is a worthless person who keeps killing people, accidentally or not, and she should kill herself to save everyone from the trouble of dealing with her. Glorious gives some flashbacks to these moments.
Twilight: Kill yourself. End your own life! You'll stop Glory. Save the universe. Maybe that'll be enough to make your parents' ghosts feel slightly less disgusted by you and your selfishness.
- The Boys Avenging: After The Deep's life crumbles around him, he attempts to retreat into the ocean, only for Namor to banish him from the water, coldly telling him to go kill himself if he wants salvation.
- Disco Academia has Katsuki realize, much to his horror, that the last thing he said to Izuku before Izuku lost his memory was that he should "take a swan dive off the roof". Since Izuku acts very differently to how he was before, the boy he knew is effectively as good as dead, leaving Katsuki regretting his words.
- Invincible (Avatar Conner): During an argument, Izuku insists that his former friend Used to Be a Sweet Kid and has what it takes to become a Pro Hero. Mako retorts that heroes don't tell people to kill themselves, something Izuku isn't able to counter.
- The Vigilante Boss and His Failed Retirement Plan opens with Izuku responding to Katsuki's suicide baiting by trying to fake a suicide attempt, only to accidentally fall off the roof. This triggers memories of his past lives resurfacing.
Arrowverse
- moral of the story (Nyame) centers around Laurel misinterpreting Oliver's callout and declaration that he's "done running after you" as him telling him that she's better off dead. So she kills herself.
Back to the Future
- Back to the Future Prequel: Someone (who Doc later realizes was the villain) calls Doc on Thanksgiving to say, "Why don't you kill yourself? Nobody likes you anyway."
Breaking Bad
- Heisenberg_52: "here is a complete and utter mess of bullshit i've concocted" oversimplifies Chuck's negative reaction to Jimmy becoming a lawyer to just the former telling the latter to kill himself.
Danganronpa
- Danganronpa: Komm Susser Tod: Iori tells the heavily traumatized Mayu that they should kill themselves, leading to a suicide attempt that her best friend interrupts. Tragically, Nanae's CPR attempt winds up suffocating her instead, leaving her as a technical blackened.
- let's go out with a bang!: When Kaede forces Miu and Kokichi to do a 'speak my truth' exercise in hopes of defusing their feud, Kokichi cheerfully tells Miu that she should jump right off the roof they're currently on. He then claims that he was just joking around, though he's quick to add that he really does think that she's a horrible person.
My Hero Academia
- Perhaps unsurprisingly, Katsuki telling Izuku that he should "take a swan dive off the roof" and hope he's reborn with a Quirk comes up very frequently in fanworks. A common Fandom-Specific Plot involves Izuku actually taking his advice, which can lead to his death, a fateful interruption, or Izuku discovering he has a Death-Activated Superpower.
- All Hail the Queen: Katsuki telling her to "take a swan dive off the roof" causes Izumi to realize that her old friend "Kacchan" effectively died long ago.
- In AMP, Izuku reveals to Katsuki that all of his Bully Brutality had rendered him suicidal long before Katsuki outright told him to kill himself, forcing Katsuki to admit to himself that deep down, he'd always known on some level how terrible he was.
- The Best Case Scenario, if you're being "realistic":
- Following Katsuki being arrested for his Vigilante Injustice spree, someone graffities "Go Take a Swan Dive off The Roof" on the side of the Bakugou's house. Izuku's disturbed at the notion that Katsuki might have said that to somebody else.
- When a Trashy True Crime documentary is made about Aldera, Katsuki's lackies reveal the "swan dive" incident without considering how this also implicates them as bullies.
- Ochako also does this to Toga but her reasons are more sympathetic. Due to having a more traumatic encounter with the yandere mixed with how she feels zero remorse for the people she killed, Ochako refuses to show her sympathy and flat out states that she deserves to die.
- Disciplinary Action revealed that much of Katsuki's bullying was Caught on Tape and shared online by their classmates. Including the "swan dive" incident, which one of his lackies posted with the title "Weirdo gets suicide baited!!!", sporting a thumbnail of Katsuki leering wickedly with his hands sparking. Nedzu finds and makes copies of all these videos, sharing them with Inko and his parents.
- Green Tea Rescue: When Saito confronts Himiko, he declares her parents should have killed her back when she was born and that the only way she can possibly make up for her crimes is by committing suicide. This pisses off Izuku immensely.
- In A Sky Of A Million Stars sees Izuku decide to jump after his conversation with All Might. Katsuki initially believes it's entirely due to what he said, and is not happy when he learns about the role Toshinori played.
- My Hero Pen-Pal has Katsuki's suicide baiting Caught on Tape, which gets dug back up and used against him later.
- Nemesis: Izuku decided to fake his death and become a notorious supervillain in order to take advantage of the nemesis system — high-profile Villains can name a specific Pro Hero as their nemesis, giving that hero top priority whenever that Villain acts. The story revolves around Mischief officially naming Katsuki as his nemesis once he earns his provisionary license, then launching a Hostage Situation that exposes their shared history.
- No One Is Untouchable: As Katsuki lies dying at his feet, Izuku tells him that if he wants to be a hero so badly, he should pray to be reborn as a decent human being in his next life, echoing Katsuki's own suicide baiting from years before.
- Past, Present, Future Kind of Deal has several characters brought in to watch their future, leading to Katsuki being confronted by Aizawa and several others about the "swan dive" incident. He claims that he was trying to discourage Izuku from risking his life trying to become a Quirkless hero.
- Sleeper Hit AU: Bakugou himself is the one who reveals to Kirishima and several other classmates that he told Midoriya to throw himself off a roof once. Everyone's horror at this is only heightened when he goes on to declare that while he didn't necessarily mean it at the time, he's now thoroughly convinced that Midoriya should have taken his advice.
- Solidarity Among Students implies that Izuku has a recording of the "swan dive" incident that he uses as leverage over Katsuki.
- Statistic: During a conversation with his coworkers, Toshinori darkly notes that referring to the 'statistics' about Quirkless people is frequently used as an anti-Quirkless dogwhistle, acting as an allegory for transphobia. Inko also reveals to him that she doesn't let her son check the mail by himself because people frequently send them things like newspaper articles about Quirkless people being 'a drain on society' and suicide rates, along with threats to kill him themselves if he doesn't take matters into his own hands.
- Switchblade: When Izuku disappears, Katsuki fears that he took his 'advice'. Later, Izuku discovers that he'd been seriously considering it and was willing to let himself be possessed for a potential suicide mission just so his demise could have some meaning.
- We Are Here: The Emerald Spark: Along with the "swan dive" incident, Izuku reveals that his classmates would leave funeral flowers on his chair at Aldera.
- We're Not Friends Kacchan: Fed up with Katsuki blatantly harassing Izuku in the middle of class, Ochako snaps that "Anyone who can tell someone else to kill themselves without batting an eye is a fucking monster!", accidentally exposing the incident to the rest of 1-A. Katsuki's lack of remorse swiftly turns the whole class against him.
- With Confidence: Mitsuki was horribly bullied for most of her school years. At one point in high school, she saw somebody had left a bouquet of flowers on her desk. While she initially assumed they'd been placed there by mistake, she was still giddy for whomever the intended recipient was... until she realized that they were red spider lilies, symbolizing death, and thus meant for her after all.
- The Wrong Choice:
- While telling Katsuki how his power works, Toshinori thoughtlessly mentions how he'd encountered a 'Quirkless boy' and decided not to make him his successor. Realizing this must have been Izuku, Katsuki calls him that evening and reveals the secret of One For All just to gloat about how he was chosen instead, finishing this off by repeating his earlier 'advice' to "take a swan dive off the roof".
- After the public learns that a Quirkless student is attending U.A.'s Hero Course, Izuku gets harassed by Quirkist Jerkasses while walking to school. Including a old woman who cruelly yells that he should just die and that "We don't need useless Quirkless people like you running around anyway." This spurs several people to jump in and defend him.
- Katsuki tells Izuku to kill himself again on their first day at U.A., in the middle of the cafeteria. Cue gasps of horror and shouts of outrage from all their peers, with several students glaring him down and Neito giving Katsuki a "The Reason You Suck" Speech.
Naruto
- The Waves Arisen
: Hinata tells Naruto about how her grand-uncle once encountered a man who was prone to making deliberately non-fatal suicide attempts as a cry for attention. The uncle heckled and derided the man's sincerity, pointing out how if he really meant it then he would have climbed a higher wall, until the man had to either admit his dishonesty or try to prove the uncle wrong.
Hinata: He flung himself at the ground with as much genuine intent to harm himself as he could muster, and broke his head open, dying instantly. It was the most flawless assassination ever performed by a Hyuuga, and none of the witnesses ever suspected my grand-uncle's outburst had been a calculated act, and that he had intended that man to die.
RWBY
- When Ruby bumps into Weiss at the start of Let Us Be Your Poison, Weiss tells Ruby to kill herself and then goes on a rant that leaves Ruby teary-eyed.
Yu-Gi-Oh!
- In Yu-Gi-Oh! The Abridged Series, Kaiba stands on the edge of a building, threatening that if Yugi attacks him he'll be thrown off by the shockwaves, meaning that Yugi has to throw the duel, as he did in canon. Unlike in canon, Yami tells him to go ahead. Later, Yugi sees him again, after having lost the duel:
Yugi: Hey, why don't you threaten to kill yourself again? Only this time, actually do it!
- In Canadian Bacon, the US city of Niagara pays its cops extra for cleaning up suicides. This led to unfortunate consequences...
- Different from the Others: The letter Paul's father writes to him essentially says that Death Is the Only Option. In the end, Paul does kill himself.
- One nurse in Doctor in Trouble has no time for Dr. Burke's complaining:
Dr. Burke: If I cut my finger, he'd faint. Then what would you do, then, eh? Applaud?
Nurse: Well, make it y'throat, and we'll cheer. - It's a Wonderful Life: Potter's cruel, heartless remark to George – "You're worth more dead than alive" – virtually drives our hero to the brink of suicide.
- Killer Joe: Ansel tells this to Chris after it's revealed that the beneficiary for Chris's mom's life insurance isn't Dottie. Now they have a killer that they owe more money to and who is taking a liking to Dottie.
- A rare case of someone trying to do this for the "victim's" own good occurs in Lean on Me. When Joe Clark runs into Sams (who had been expelled for dealing crack), who pleads to be let back into school, Joe drags him up to the roof of his building, gives him a very harsh lecture on what could happen to him if he keeps using crack, and then dares him to jump off. Sams breaks down in tears and refuses, making a promise to clean up his act, prompting Clark to give him another chance.
- Happens in Lethal Weapon multiple times.
- Murtaugh and Riggs are responding to a suicidal man standing on the ledge of a building. Riggs goes up to the roof in an attempt to talk the man down. After talking a bit, Riggs manages to get very close to the man and slaps a handcuff on him, handcuffing them together. The man starts freaking out, but Riggs actually starts encouraging the man to jump; he insults the man, saying that he's a coward for backing down now, just because his death will kill Riggs as well. Eventually Riggs jumps and pulls them both down...onto a crash-pad the police had already set up.
- Immediately afterwards, Murtaugh, furious with Riggs, drags Riggs into a nearby building and they being arguing. Murtaugh thinks Riggs is suicidal and is a danger to himself and others. Murtaugh tells Riggs to just kill himself already. Riggs actually pulls out his gun and points it at his head, screaming at Murtaugh that he'll do it. Murtaugh one-ups this and yells back, telling him to go ahead and do it, since it'd be doing him a favor. Ultimately, Murtaugh is horrified when Riggs almost goes through with it. He assumed he was bluffing.
- Even worse when you realize Riggs technically DOES go through with it. He pulls the trigger but Murtaugh gets his thumb in the way just in time.
- Miss Meadows: Miss Meadows walks into a diner to get her class some snacks... approximately thirty seconds after a deranged robber has massacred everyone in the place. When the perp whimpers, "I want to die," Miss M. promptly agrees he should - and then delivers this soliloquy:
Miss Meadows: You're of no use to society. You'll waste innocent taxpayers' dollars, abuse the weak legal system and enter a cowardly plea of insanity to a morally bankrupt defense attorney. For what? Oh, and once incarcerated, you're gonna cost taxpayers approximately $47,000 per year. So you know what? Make sure you point the barrel of the gun to the back of the throat.
- Le Plaisir: When Josephine tells Jean that she'll kill herself if he doesn't come back to her, he tells her to go ahead, and says she can use the upstairs window. He is shocked when she climbs the stairs and jumps out.
- In Silent Tongue, Awbonnie's ghost dares Talbot to kill himself so he can join her. For several moments it looks like Talbot is about to eat his gun, but at the last second, he flips the gun over and fires at the ghost: to no effect, obviously. It is not clear if this was an attempt at Psychic-Assisted Suicide or just mind games.
- Unfriended: According to a pic sent by Billie227 to Blaire, Laura tried to extend an olive branch towards Val through a text message when her bullying became intolerable. Val told her to "go kill yourself".
- Ninety Seconds To Midnight: In the suicide note that she addresses to her parents, Faith writes "KYS" before deciding this doesn't have enough "pizzazz" and changing it to "Follow my example."
- In one book of the Asian Saga, part of Robb Struan's backstory is being an alcoholic who terrified his wife and children and was frequently found in ditches. After nearly drinking himself to death during a particularly bad bout, his older brother Dirk sat him in front of a mirror, gave him a gun, and told him to either shoot himself or swear before God never to drink again. He takes the oath, and manages to keep to it.
- Charles Dickens uses this to firmly establish Scrooge as a Jerkass at the beginning of A Christmas Carol. When told that many of the poor would rather die than go to the hellish workhouses, Scrooge replies, "If they would rather die, they had better do it, and decrease the surplus population." It is a slightly lighter example than others since there is no-one from the desperate people there to hear him and be influenced to do it, especially since it was more a figure of speech rather than a known intent. It is still a bad sign about Scrooge's capability for empathy.
- In Discworld, Ankh-Morpork citizens spying a potential building jumper will start shouting advice on the best buildings to jump from (such as buildings where the streets have cobblestones instead of mud, guaranteeing a quick death). Played for Laughs (like virtually everything else in Ankh-Morpork).
- Backstory of Dune. While Liet Kynes is teaching the Fremen about his dream of making Arrakis a garden, a decision is made to kill him because he's a security risk to the sietch. A Fremen fighter is sent to execute him. When he approaches, Liet tells him "Remove yourself", and the man deliberately falls on his own crysknife. The other Fremen see this as an omen and decide to do anything Liet says.
- In Neverwhere, Richard's trial involves billboards that tell him to just jump in front of the underground train. Which may be the entire point - those who fail the trial do, more often than not, end up dead.
- In Our Dumb Century, a radio broadcast with Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy has the latter incessantly urging the listening audience to commit suicide as the "only solution" to life's meaninglessness. Tens of thousands of listeners comply. Bergen disclaims responsibility for and foreknowledge of McCarthy's speech.
"Everything is hopeless and barren, and life is meaningless. 'Why continue?' I ask you. Give up the charade. Put a gun to your head and take your own life. It's the only solution. Use a gun, stove gas, a curtain cord, eat roach paste, jump off the Chrysler Building, what have you. Take your own life. It's the only solution."
- In Rebecca, the Creepy Housekeeper Mrs Danvers very seriously encourages the second Mrs de Winter to commit suicide. That was because she was passionately devoted to the first Mrs de Winter and felt the successor was taking her place. (Mrs Danvers was, as you may presume, a total psycho.) She is not impolite or emotional when she does it, which makes it all the more scary.
- WWW Trilogy: Webmind observes a girl who's suicidal being goaded online into killing herself, and she does, live on webcam. He later realizes the import of all this, and helps divert other people from this. When part of him gets cut off, though, it becomes malicious, either doing this itself or manipulating them into suicide.
- The Benny Hill Show: Benny is a minister who happens upon a man (offscreen) who is threatening to jump off a ledge. Benny tries to talk him down
but the guy will have none of it.
Benny: Don't jump! Think of your wife and family.
Man: I am. That's why I'm jumping.
[snip]
Benny: Think of next Saturday, going to Elland Road and seeing our beloved Leeds United play?
Man: I hate Leeds United. I'm a Liverpool fan.
Benny: Well, flaming well jump then! - The Boys (2019): When a young woman is reported to be threatening suicide by leaping off of a building, Homelander is sent to try to talk her down. But Homelander being Homelander, he does a poor job of it and, after learning that his lover Stormfront ended her own life, just stops caring and tells the woman to jump — even priming his laser vision to force her to kill herself.
- Breaking Bad:
- In the finale, Walter asks Jesse to kill him. Jesse doesn't oblige, and tells Walter he should do it himself. Walter doesn't, and spends some time in the lab while he bleeds out and Jesse escapes.
- There's also Marie's comment to Walt when she finds out about his drug empire:
Marie: Why don't you just kill yourself, Walt?
- CSI: Cyber: In "URL, Interrupted", a teenage girl is subjected to a systematic campaign of cyberbullying centred around a website called "Kill Yourself Zoey Tan".
- In the first season of Dexter, one of the title character's targets is a Serial Killer that uses this as his modus operandi; he is a psychologist who encourages his vulnerable, mentally ill patients to kill themselves by taking an overdose.
- Doctor Who:
- In "Dalek", the Ninth Doctor delivers this line almost verbatim to the titular creature, and gets a great big Shut Up, Hannibal! for his efforts. An unusual case of the (anti-)hero delivering this line to the villain though it is intended to be a What the Hell, Hero? moment.
- The Doctor is also pretty insistent that Lady Cassandra die in "New Earth", not just due to being a sociopathic mass-murderer who takes over people's bodies, but also because he believes she has so greatly outlived her natural lifespan, and not in the right way, either (see the mass-murdering sociopathic body-snatcher thing).
- In Fawlty Towers, the episode "Gourmet Night" sees everything going wrong for Basil, not the least of which is the chef too drunk to cook the dinners. When the duck that was supposed to be the main course falls to the floor and is stepped on, Basil's hated wife Sybil asks if there's anything she can do to help. Basil snaps, "Yes! Go kill yourself!". He then retracts that statement: "No, wait! Call Andre first..."
- In Game of Thrones, Yara Greyjoy essentially says this to her brother Theon when he is suffering from PTSD at a brothel (which she dragged him to, despite knowing he was castrated). While it was intended as an example of Deliberate Values Dissonance, as there is no such thing as psychology in Westeros, a lot of viewers took issue with the fact that Yara's treatment of Theon works, implying that her actions were completely correct.
- The Girl From Plainville: The detective investigating a death by suicide reviews the texts exchanged by the deceased with his girlfriend. He is horrified when he reads her messages exhorting the distraught teen to go on and do it already.
- In a Law & Order: SVU episode Ripped from the Headlines, "Babes", a woman poses as the boyfriend of a pregnant teenage girl, and emails all kinds of horrible things to her, leading to the girl's suicide. Although it later turned out the girl's boyfriend killed her and made it look like a suicide.
- M*A*S*H: Col. Potter deals with a suicidal patient by giving him the Radish Cure: Potter puts the mask from the knockout gas on the boy and forces him to continue to breathe in the fumes even when the boy tries to struggle free. Potter then points out the dichotomy, which makes the patient no longer suicidal.
- Women on Maury who are looking for their babies' daddies sometimes say this when the possible daddy is particularly belligerent about paternity. Subverted in that the daddies (probably) aren't suicidal.
- Person of Interest actually plays this for Black Comedy pretty well in the Batman Cold Open of "Prophets", though this is due almost entirely to surrounding circumstances. After chasing a perp all the way up onto the ledge of the roof of a building, he threatens to jump, and Reese tells him to go ahead. What turns this from Moral Event Horizon to Black Comedy is the fact that the perp is guilty of embezzling money and killing to cover it up, he is thrown off (figuratively, not off the ledge) by Reese's response rather than spurred on (as in, "Did he just tell me to kill myself? I was not expecting to hear that from a cop!"), and the whole thing is part of a larger plan by Reese to save his life.
- The first episode of Sherlock, "A Study in Pink", involves what at first appears to be a coincidental string of suicides but turns out to be a Serial Killer who uses this as his modus operandi; he forcibly persuades his victims to play Russian Roulette with poison pills.
Cabbie: I don't want to kill you, Mr. Holmes. I'm gonna talk to you, and then you're going to kill yourself.
- Star Trek: The Original Series: Captain Kirk defeats the M5 computer in the episode "The Ultimate Computer" this way, by means of a Logic Bomb (this isn't seen as sociopathic because M5 is a nonanthropomorphic AI, plus it's already killed a bunch of people, including a Red Shirt who tried to deactivate it).
- Superstore has Amy get called in to work two days after giving birth due to a system error (and corporate) deciding she doesn't have enough hours for maternity leave. After Glenn tries to make her feel better about her unspeakable stress and pain by giving her a bath bomb, she finally snaps and goes on a rant at him, starting with one of these.
Amy: So you think...a bath bomb...is the solution to all of my problems?Glenn: ...It's not a real bomb, and-Amy: Just kill yourself!
- On The Story of Tracy Beaker a character brushed off the main character by telling her to "go and play in the traffic".
- True Detective: Rust tells this to a woman who killed three of her children. He's suggesting this because prison doesn't take kindly to people who hurt children.
- The Bloodhound Gang song "Lift Your Head Up High (And Blow Your Brains Out)"
- The song "Backmask Warning!" by Mindless Self Indulgence has this as its central theme, with the chorus encouraging the listener to go kill themselves, with the verses featuring all kinds of horrific imagery that presumably would also encourage suicide:
Hate and devour the young and the weaker ones, and dont forget the guns
You're gonna need em to go kill yourself
All the people you love in a river of blood
And dont forget the guns
You're gonna need em to DESTROY- Played straight with "You'll Rebel to Anything". The lyrics tell people to drink poison or aspirins instead of venting so much.
- The A Perfect Circle song "The Outsider" was written from the perspective of someone who doesn't understand what suicidal people are going through and assumes they all just want attention, ending with:
If you choose to pull the trigger
Should your drama prove sincere
Do it somewhere far away from here - Timbaland's "Kill Yourself", a Boastful Rap that implores all of Timbaland's haters to off themselves, as they'll never be like him.
- Queen: The opening track of A Night at the Opera (1975), "Death on Two Legs", features a variation of this as part of its nature as a Take That! towards ex-manager Norman Sheffield:
''Feel good? Are you satisfied?
Do you feel like suicide? (I think you should)" - In the song "Spring" by Rammstein a crowd forms to watch a man jump off a bridge, encouraging him to do it to "redeem himself", culminating in someone pushing him off because he was taking too long, supposedly it will then go to that person. The worst part? He wasn't even suicidal, he was just on the bridge to get a better view.
- Something else that strikes scary is that the man who did push him might be the next victim, it is presumably a chain of events for every individual to redeem themselves.
- In Avenue Q, when Princeton is moping about not having a purpose, the Bad Idea Bears suggest he kill himself and offer him a noose. There's a reason why they're called Bad Idea Bears.
- In J.B., Nickles' ambition is to convince Job to end the suffering inflicted upon him by God by taking his own life to spite Him—"reject the whole of creation with a stale pink pill," as he puts it. When Nickles confronts J.B. in the penultimate scene, he tries to plant the idea in his mind, arguing that, compared to all the suicides in the history of the world, he has suffered as much as any of them and seen even more. However, J.B. refuses to listen to him.
- In The Ladies of the Corridor, the bellhop, annoyed at Mildred Tynan disturbing the peace and not paying her bills, suggests that she go take a flying leap. While he may have intended it sarcastically, she takes up the offer gleefully and flings herself out the window, much to his astonishment.
- Invoked and Averted in Richard III (although Richard is bluffing in this case):
Lady Anne: Arise, dissembler; thought I wish thy death, I will not be the executioner.
Gloucester: Then bid me kill myself, and I will do it.
Lady Anne: I have already.
Gloucester: Tush, that was in thy rage; speak it again, and, even with the word, that hand, which, for thy love, did kill thy love, shall, for thy love, kill a far truer love; to both their deaths thou shalt be accessary. - Oklahoma! has a rare heroic example: Curly tries to do this to Jud in the song "Pore Jud is Daid," in which he sings about how much people would miss Jud if he hanged himself. It doesn't work, and Jud is legitimately a terrible person, but he hasn't done anything too awful yet at the point in the show where the song occurs.
- The Blackwell Series: In The Blackwell Convergence, The first ghost Rosa and Joey help is of a man on a ledge, still ready to jump as he thinks he's still alive. One solution has Joey and Rosa nudge him into getting over his wife leaving him and getting it to click that he's dead. In the other, Joey insults him to break his ego and tells him to jump. When the man floats out and fails to plummet to his death, he realizes he's already done that before. Either way has him move on.
- Handsome Jack of Borderlands 2 fame really enjoys telling players to kill themselves. From the first area to the game, he tells them to kill themselves. Then near the end of the game, he'll give them a quest to kill themselves. Even before you play the game, if you bought the Diamond Plate Loot Chest
◊, he'll tell them to kill themselves!
- Made somewhat less dark by Borderlands' resurrection system. When he asks you to kill yourself, doing exactly that is a perfectly viable option - jump off a cliff and you *complete the quest*, resurrecting immediately with a compensation in money and xp points. Alternatively you call a suicide hotline and he declares you a coward.
- Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel!: At the end of the game, Aurelia Hammerlock recommends (knowing he won't listen but still tries) that Jack kill himself because he's so monstrous that even an evil bitch like her can't comprehend him, and while she isn't fazed by the karma she'll receive in the future, she is certain karma will hit him with the force of a planet (which is pretty much what happens).
- In Borderlands 3, Tyreen Calypso gives the player a sidequest to kill themselves in front of a camera in exchange for a Legendary Pistol. Doing so earns you the "Sellout", a fairly decent gun that comes with Tyreen's voice constantly mocking you for being a "Gun slut".
- Conker's Bad Fur Day: After the "boss fight" with Franky the Pitchfork, Ron and Reg suggest that Franky should kill himself, with them even having a rope prepared. Franky takes them up on their offer, tells them to get fucked, and proceeds to hang himself. Ron and Reg proceed to laugh at him, because Franky doesn't even got a neck, meaning he never actually killed himself.
- de Blob 2: During the final level, Comrade Black tells the player to jump off the stage when nearing the end, demonstrating his maturity for all to see.
- The edges of cliffs and Bottomless Pits across Demon's Souls, the entire Dark Souls trilogy, and Elden Ring are inevitably carpeted with player-written messages reading "try jumping".
- The End Is Nigh (2017): A ghost on the SS Exodus tells Ash to kill himself so he can take credit for his death and get female admiration.
- Fallout 3 has the sad case of Mister Lopez who goes to the top tower of Rivet City each day to contemplate jumping. The Lone Wanderer can choose to talk him into it, out of it, or just shove him over the edge.
- In Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, Madd Dogg is on top of a building thinking about jumping after losing all his money and his rhyme book. A couple of bystanders encourage him to jump.
- CJ later tells Madd Dogg he should've let him jump when he finds out he gave his mansion away to Big Poppa, a drug dealer during his coke binge.
- Jimmy and the Pulsating Mass: In the Blood Marsh, when Punch Tanaka laments his failures as a leader of the Petty Thugs and allowing himself to be pushed around by the Pulsating Mass, he contemplates jumping off the bridge to his death. Jonathon Bear then comes and tells him to stop talking and jump, with Tanaka immediately complying. This serves as the final sign that Jonathon Bear is not a nice, friendly teddy bear he appears to be on the surface, which pushes Jimmy to push him into the furnace in the Whispering Valley.
- A rare heroic example can happen at the end of Mass Effect 1. If you've got enough Intimidate points, you can convince Saren, who by this point has become nothing but a Brainwashed and Crazy slave to the Reaper Sovereign, to snap out of it just long enough to kill himself.
Shepard: There's still one way to stop this... if you've got the guts.
- In Needy Streamer Overload, having Ame's mental issues become too severe can lead to her having a breakdown on-stream that ends up shattering her streamer image and cause people to tell her to go kill herself already. Other times, her issues might cause her to tell the player character P-chan how unloved she is and that she might as well die already, which the player then can choose to double down on and dare her to. Unsurprisingly, a few Multiple Endings have Ame take her own life.
- If Curtis LeMay is succeeded by Gus Hall as President of the United States in The New Order: Last Days of Europe, the staunchly anti-Communist LeMay's transition letter to Hall will instruct him of the proper way to eat his gun. Hall, bemused, frames the letter and displays it on his desk in the Oval Office.
- The Final Boss of OMORI repeatedly dares the player character to end his own life at the climax of the fight. To twist the knife, this is Sunny's own guilt, the titular Omori, saying those words to him, and if you give up the fight, Sunny goes through with it.
- Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door: Upon being rejected by a Goomba seeking a lover, the Yoshi on your team tells said Goomba to "take a long walk off a short pier." Since said Yoshi had only hatched a few chapters ago, and in an area frequented by professional wrestlers no less, he likely didn’t grasp the severity of the statement, but it can still be jarring.
- Can you believe that this shows up in Pokémon of all places? More specifically, the post-game of Pokémon Mystery Dungeon: Explorers has Darkrai (disguised as Cresselia) tell the protagonists that their journey through time caused a distortion in the fabric of space (that was actually Darkrai’s doing), and that the only way to fix it is to "disappear", either by having someone take them out, or to do it to themselves. What makes this worse is that since said protagonists are heavily implied to be fairly young, Darkrai is essentially trying to convince children to commit suicide. And your partner actually contemplates going through with it. It’s honestly surprising that this game still got an "E for Everyone" age rating.
- The "Go Commit Die" meme of Roblox is a rare example of this Played for Laughs.
- SOMA: At the Site Upsilon Comm Center, attempting to contact Omicron will have Simon being told to kill himself as there's nothing left to live for by Ross on the other end.
- In the first Trauma Center (Atlus) game, after Derek and Angie save the life of a patient who was in a suicidal depression and berates them for not letting her die, Angie loses her temper and tells her that, with so many people struggling to survive in the hospital, if she wants to die, she should just die and make room for other people.
- In Yandere Simulator, if you bully a student enough, the bully clique will graffiti their desk with these. Bully them even further, and they'll act on it.
- Doki Doki Literature Club!:
- Yuri mid-Sanity Slippage in Act 2 says that nobody would care if Natsuki killed herself during a discussion. Towards the end of the Act, she out and tells Monika to end her life, causing her to leave the room in a huff. Ironically, Yuri herself dies by self-inflicted stabbing a moment later. In Act 3, Monika tells you that, while she was ultimately the one who drove Yuri to insanity, she is still disturbed by what Yuri said to her prior to killing herself.
- There's an implication that in addition to Mind Rape, Monika may have also started telling Sayori things that, at the very least, actively made her depression worse. At one point, when the player character notices Sayori acting off, Monika decides to have a one-on-one conversation with her. It's unclear what the conversation is about, but some of Sayori's comments afterwards and her final poem suggest it was something pretty bad.
- In Men in Hats, when Jeriah asks Aram for an opinion on a wangsty poem he wrote, Aram holds out a knife and tells him to put it in his stomach
.
- In Penny and Aggie, in an episode, Asshole Victim Cyndi does this indirectly with her morally conflicted kidnapper, Charlotte, using Reverse Psychology. Charlotte does attempt suicide and passes out due to blood loss, much to Cyndi's amusement, but the two are found before Charlotte actually dies.
[Suicide's] not an option for you. I mean, if you were gonna do that, you already would have. The knife is right there. You're just gonna have to live with what you've done.
- Played for Laughs in Something*Positive. Davan tells a group of diehard Rocky Horror fans that by protesting his Shock Treatment stage adaptation, they're only helping to create more publicity for the production. When one of the protesters says it hurts to hear that, Davan offers him "a little something to ease the pain." It's a poster of the Rippy the Razor mascot, showing how to slit one's wrists properly.
- 5 Second Films:
- The inventor of time travel and his friend/roommate commits suicide after many time travelers arrive in his/their home and convince him to.
- Ask a Lobster
:
"Hey lobster. How do I make money off the internet?"
"Oh, oh. Kill yourself."
- In asdfmovie 10, the movie opens with a person in the crowd calling out to a jumper not to jump... only for him to set up a camera and then tell him to now jump.
- Fightmarker rap-battle parodies have used this for Black Comedy multiple times:
- In "Whiteface vs. Trollface", Trollface tells Whiteface to "Press E to kill [them]self."
- In "Filthy Frank vs. Eric Andre", Filthy Frank intentionally breaks the rhythm of the beat to tell Eric "Losing a battle? You should KILL YOURSELF! OH YEAH! Do it, like right now!"
- In "Deadpool vs. Peter Griffin", God Peter is about to make an MCU pun by calling Deadpool "the worst MC", but then gets abruptly interrupted by someone saying "Fightmarker", to which he replies with another Family Guy meme by saying "Kill yourself!"
- In Leet Lingo, the abbreviation "kys" is sometimes used by cyberbullies to mean "kill yourself." According to Urban Dictionary, though, more wholesome users prefer to reclaim the acronym to mean "keep yourself safe," which is much better advice, although still probably shouldn't be used without making sure the recipient understands it the same way.
- The internet meme You Should Kill Yourself...Now!
also known as "LowTierGod copypasta" is a notable example that spawned after the Twitch streamer LowTierGod gave one of his most infamous speech, directed at a viewer who got under his skin:
You're gonna stay on my dick until you die! You serve no purpose in life. Your purpose in life is to be in my stream sucking on my dick daily. Your purpose is to be in that chat blowing the dick daily. Your life is nothing! You serve zero purpose! You should kill yourself, NOW! And give somebody else a piece of that oxygen and, and ozone layer, that's covered up so that we can breathe inside this blue trapped bubble. 'Cause what are you here for? To worship me? Kill yourself. I mean that, with a hundred percent, with a thousand percent. - Party Crashers: In "The most BRUTAL Board in Mario Party 1...
", Vernias says this to Nick when the latter reveals that the color of his sweater is pink:
Vernias: You should jump into Magma Mountain, NOW!!! Drown in the lava, NOW!!! - Robotbox and Cactus: Cactus commits suicide in "Requiem" after being goaded to do it by Robotbox, who, after his death, proceeds to build "Club Robo" on his grave.
- American Dad!:
- Klaus breaks the fourth wall in "Can I Be Frank (With You)" just to tell an acquaintance of his to kill himself while looking at the camera, with the justification that his life is so utterly mundane it's already been lived a million times before.
- In "Meter Made", Roger briefly implies that Steve had to kill himself after unknowingly pleasuring himself with a nude painting of Hayley.
- Beavis and Butt-Head: In the episode "Jump!", Beavis and Butt-Head get caught up in a banker threatening to jump to his death after he was about to be arrested for embezzlement. They try to do this trope, thinking it'd be cool to see him splatter on the ground, but they're just as inept at that as everything else they've ever done, to the point that they accidentally talk him off the ledge and reignite his will to live.
- Big Mouth: In "How to Have an Organsm", after Andrew is caught by his parents sending a dick pic to his own cousin, Maurice the Hormone Monster is genuinely surprised that Andrew is just planning to run away rather than commit suicide.
- Family Guy:
- In "Stew-Roids", after trying to comfort Meg, who's even more miserable than usual due to being rejected from a party being held in their house, Lois eventually gets tired of trying, hands her a Sylvia Plath novel and a bottle of Ambien, and tells her "whatever happens, happens."
- In "A Fistful of Meg ", Lois tells Meg, "Just because a Facebook page has over 2,000 likes doesn't mean you have to kill yourself."
- Futurama:
- In "A Head in the Polls", Bender literally sells his body (made of zinc, which has just seen a spike in value thanks to a mine collapse) and gloats about his newfound wealth to passersby by saying "Compare your lives to mine and then kill yourselves!" Comes with a healthy dose of irony, considering he has been reduced to an immobile head incapable of stopping random dogs from peeing on him.
- In the episode "How Hermes Requisitioned His Groove Back", Hermes is poised to jump off the tower when he fears he may be demoted. Bender heckles him, "Do a flip!"
- Hazbin Hotel: After Sir Pentious fails rather spectacularly at being The Mole for the Vees, Vox laughs at his incompetence, insults him, and then tells him if the residents of the hotel don't kill him, he should just do it himself.
- Metalocalypse: In the episode "Dethstars", when the director tries to direct Dethklok in their movie, Dethklok points out that that violates his contract, fires him, and encourages him to kill himself. He does. A tabloid even puts a picture of it on its front page.
- The Simpsons:
- "Hello Gutter Hello Fadder": When Homer deliberates a little too long in a line to jump off a skyscraper, the guy behind him says "Less chat, more splat, pal" and pushes him off. Subverted both in that Homer wasn't hurt by the fall, and because the guy was planning to do the same thing himself immediately afterwards, so he wasn't being a hypocrite.
- Another example: The Season 19 episode "Eternal Moonshine of the Simpson Mind", where Homer can't remember what he did last day and he wrongly assumes that he hit Marge. He goes to a bridge to kill himself and Patty and Selma encourage him to do it, but when he goes to avert it, Patty and Selma push him off. When Homer instead lands on a yacht that's holding a party for him, he assumes they did it for this purpose; they go along with the assumption, and they offer him a rope and boulder for an "afterparty at the bottom of the ocean."
- In "The Boys of Bummer", after Bart has suffered a complete mental breakdown from the constant bullying he's received from the whole town, he's dangling from a rope on the top of the town's water tower after spray-painting "I HATE BART SIMPSON" on the side and is babbling about he hates himself too. The town keeps ragging on him and Chief Wiggum (a cop, with the sworn duty to prevent suicides, but also one of the people who have been bullying him throughout the episode) tells him to jump. Bart does, and miraculously only ends up being knocked into a coma.
- South Park:
- In "Miss Teacher Bangs a Boy", Cartman tells the hall monitor to kill himself.
- In "Cash for Gold", Stan calls a shopping network when his grandfather was spending all his savings buying from them, and, in a nod to Bill Hicks, telling the hosts to kill themselves for taking advantage of old people. The elderly viewers join in and all start telling him to kill himself in a Running Gag. In the end, it works.

