VirPed Panel: 10 March 2024

“Leonard” asks:

How many paedophiles struggle with suicidal ideation? Have any of you struggled with it? How great did these suicidal feelings become?

I’ve had many suicidal thoughts throughout my adult life. Sometimes something as small as seeing people talk about us online has thrown me into a sea of suicidal thoughts, just a general feeling that I’m not wanted and a valuable member of society so I should off myself. It’s also hard going through these tough times and never being able to talk about it.

I don’t think suicidality is inevitable for MAPs, but I think where a person has a tendency already to think that way, realising they are a pedophile gives a lot of fresh reasons to take the prospect of suicide seriously.

I started having frequent suicidal thoughts around age 12, not long after I realised I was gay. I grew up in a pretty homophobic environment so It seemed it was unlkely I would meet anyone my age who would not judge me. It was a couple more years before I realised I was also a pedophile, which didn’t make the situation better.

Suicidal ideaion has pretty much been a feature of my life ever since (now well into middle age). However, I should say, it’s never been the fact I’m a pedophile (or gay) that made me suicidal. I’ve just always feared being harmed by people who can’t understand I’m not evil. I also fear losing the things that make me happy, for instance if I got outed or told the wrong person.

The longest spell I had without frequent and intense suicidal feelings was when I first connected with the anti-contact pedophile community. It was the first time I could really talk about it without anyone reacting like a bomb went off.

I can’t say it cured me of all suicidality but it changed my assessment of whether my life is worth continuing with. I still fear being outed (and fired, harrassed etc.). I think probably the fear of the situation affects suicidality more than facing the situation itself would - but I guess we’ll see. I still think suicide would be a rational option for me in certain circumstances.

At the moment, though, having friends who understand me and who haven’t been scared off is what keeps me going.

The only time I really felt suicidal was after my girlfriend in high school broke up with me. In my mind she was my way out of being minor attracted. I thought she was the only one who would help me live a “normal” life so when she broke up with me I had a brief moment where I was thinking about ending it all but the thought faded and I realized that it wasn’t the answer.

I’m in my late 60s and have suffered with depression since my 20s. It has been severe at times. I’ve never attempted suicide, but I have thought about it a lot. The idea of suicide can be comforting if a person is in a lot of psychological pain, knowing that you could make it stop if you really wanted. But over time I’ve come to think of the level of suicidal thoughts as a sort of barometer – if I’m thinking about it a lot, then the depression is on the bad side. But I’m not going to do it unless some other motivation comes up – a painful degenerative disease, perhaps.

However, my thoughts of suicide have hardly anything to do with my strongest sexual and romantic attraction being to small girls. I didn’t realize until my 50s that my tender feelings for such girls were actually romantic and sexual, and when so recognized, more powerful than my attraction to adult women. I’ve never felt the slightest danger of acting sexually with a young girl, and the attraction itself is not a negative thing, let alone something so negative it would make me think of suicide.

Things in the world sometimes don’t line up with our expectations. Yes, I’m a pedophile. Yes, I think about suicide a fair amount. No, they have very little to do with each other.

I was suicidal for a very short time in my life a couple of years ago. What did it was a number of back-to-back events, which culminated in a google doc being written about me exposing me as a MAP to an online community I was a part of. I should note, my only “crime” was being attracted to children. I lost a lot of friends and a lot of hopes and ambitions all at once, and I was uncertain whether this secret would leak into my real life. Two years later, I can say things have been going very well for me.

I’ve always been a really upbeat and positive person, so it doesn’t surprise me that I bounced back as quickly as I did. I got outed on the Saturday, and on the Tuesday I suddenly felt the boundless opportunity of life reveal itself to me once again. I was only suicidal for 3 days after the exposé, and for 10 days during the month before when my friends suddenly became very hostile towards me. That’s just me, though. I imagine most paedophiles have it much worse than me. My heart breaks for other people dealing with things like what I went through. It was a terrifying experience.

Suicidal ideation is unsurprisingly very common amongst pedophiles, and I’d wager they’re even higher amongst virtuous pedophiles. My teenage years and early 20s in particular were awful in a lot of ways. I thought about suicide a lot. I hated myself for being this way, I hated myself for feeling so apart from everyone else, though this wasn’t always due to my pedophilia. I think isolation in general is really prone to bringing out these thoughts. One defense mechanism I’ve always used is to just block out everything negative subconsciously, denying my identity, and distracting myself to feel happier in cycles throughout my life, but this house of cards always eventually collapsed and I was forced to deal with the root of the issue, until the cycle repeated itself again.

I’ve never been depressed or suicidal. Being arrested for images at about age 60 was both shocking and traumatic. But I always had interests in life that went beyond my attractions, so coping was not an issue. But I was very taken aback at the proliferation on the forum of those who felt or had felt suicidal. So I started a poll about suicidal tendencies. What turned into a large sample size over the years revealed that about 8% of forum members had never contemplated suicide. About 25% had attempted it. Those numbers do haunt me.

I’ve had strong suicidal ideation come in waves for me. I have often gone years where suicidal ideation was like breathing for me—every other thought was “Kill yourself. You’re a pedophile, kill yourself.” and then I’d have a year or two off, and then it would start up again and last three, four, or five years again. I’ve never actually attempted, though I’ve come close on a few occasions.

Becoming a parent really intensified these feelings for me. The only pedophiles I knew about where the ones I saw in the news who got caught touching kids or possessing CSEM. I have never done either, but based on having only knowing about one type of pedophile, I concluded that all pedophiles must eventually hurt kids in one way or another. I began to contemplate whether it was best to destroy my children’s lives via suicide or via this thing I believed I would eventually do. Ultimately I resolved that I must kill myself, but in desperation I also came out to a friend so someone would know why I was going to do it.

That set in motion a chain of events that lead me here, and I’m happy to report that the suicidal ideation has been at bay for over a year now, and I no longer have any worry that I would ever harm a child.

Not all pedophiles have suicidal ideation. According to a poll mentioned in another answer 8% of us don’t. Being part of the VP community, it’s an unfortunate reality that when people you have developed a rapport with dissappear from the forum, you have to wonder. Yes, I’ve been suicidal, I think from my answer and the others, that goes without saying by this point. I was fortunate enough to have a therapist who was available 24/7 by text and kept me on psychiatric life support during the worst of it.

I think suicidality is very common for MAPs, almost typical. That cannot be too surprising, can it? MAPs learn techniques of self-censorship and self-isolation at an early age. I think we feel alone a lot. It is hard for us to ask for assistance. I am hoping that can change as people realize we have limited control over this condition and compassion not condemnation would be most helpful for us, and better for the safety of children.

Nobody knows the exact number of pedophiles who have struggled with suicidal thoughts, but understandably there are a lot of us who have. When you consider that pedophiles are amongst the most hated groups of people in society, assumed to be monsters even if we haven’t done anything wrong, it’s not difficult to imagine how this can affect our mental health, especially when many of us discover our attractions when we’re just teenagers (sometimes as young as 13).

Having said that, many of us don’t struggle with suicidal thoughts. I don’t think I’ve ever been properly suicidal, though when I was 16-17 (when I was first truly realizing who I was) I did go through some mental health troubles which included occasional thoughts or dreams/nightmares about suicide. These days I don’t struggle with that anymore, primarily due to all the support I’ve received from the community. I still have rough days, but they are much easier to manage thanks to VirPed.

I’ve struggled with suicidal ideation for most of my life, both related to and unrelated to being a pedophile. I also have several attempts under my belt, with the most recent one being about two years ago.

I believe most MAPs struggle with this, and a poll that the members of Virtuous Pedophiles has taken suggests the same.

I sometimes struggle defining exactly what I had for the worst period of my life. I wanted to die, but I also wanted to live at the same time. I knew that my life could be good, I just didn’t know how, or when, or even if it would. The realization that I was a pedophile was tormenting me. I believed what the world said about people me, I believed I was doomed to offend. So there were many times where I was convinced that taking my life was the only way. I got as close to having a knife against my wrist, oh and I had also tied a noose. But I was too much of a coward to pull through. Music was always a help. I remember listening to Sick and Disqusting by Beartooth quite a lot. His wailing of these lyrics just resonated with me so well:

“God, I don’t know if I’ll ever be ready to die God, I’m too much of a coward to give you my life And I know that I’m still gonna cry every single night But if you want me, I’m gonna stay here and fight ’til you say “Son, your heart is mine”

Today? I am glad I never succumbed. My life is good, in many ways. And one of the most rewarding things I do is to be able to support other MAPs going through the same thing.