I've unfortunately witnessed suicides and attempts close enough to tell you that it is unlikely you could have done anything as a non-related person far away.

Taking him to lunch and treating him as a human being would probably been a super nice thing to do for him.

I know you feel that the part where you think "man I should have said something different" makes you feel bad, but people do much, much more regrettable gaffes they realize only after the fact. Like, for instance, a spouse who considers maybe to lock away the firearms, but not doing it (an unfortunate example from real life, not mine luckily).

Luckily most people are not experts in suicide. Even though if you had concrete intuition that something was off, having no experience of this before, you probably could not tell if the intuition was pointing at something actionable, or imagined.

Persons who are under treatment, with their family, still end up performing a suicide.

I know it feels bad for you, having interacted with him briefly before his passing away, but you should not feel guilt (even though its a natural human reaction you do).

It is important for you to know that his suicide was most likely a direct reaction to an unfavorable court ruling that he was not at all expecting to turn out this way.

Without going into detail, rest assured that this has nothing to do with you, and there is nothing you could have done to change this.

It would be incredibly sad if you feel partly responsible for this, even if it is understandable. In this case, however, your interactions with him may have helped him somewhat. His actions on this day, however, were nothing you could have influenced either way.

Please do yourself a big favor and don't take any of this on yourself.

Yeah, I've been reading up on the details, and I feel a bit better today than I did yesterday. It's easy to feel guilty over stuff that really has nothing to do with you sometimes. I suspect tomorrow I'll feel a little better and that'll continue for a few more days.

Despite his many, many faults, I did genuinely like Lowtax. The few short conversations I had with him before were very funny and pleasant, and I'll miss his strange humor on YouTube. He was a complicated dude, and his fall over the last few years shows how someone can go from "king of the internet" to laughingstock in a relatively short time, and serves as a cautionary tale. The rest of the SA community very justifiably turned on him, and I don't blame them for that at all, but I dunno, I guess I liked him enough to cut him a bit more slack than he deserved.

I’ve never shared this story publicly, but this comment made my hope that others can glean some insight from it, however small it may be.

One of my best friends committed suicide whilst I was in college. My friends and I figured it out from a FB post and ended up finding him before he had passed, but early enough to believe we could have saved him.

After years of therapy and discussion with my friends that were there with me. My friend made a decision extremely privately to take his own life.

There was no way that any of us could have ever done anything substantive to have altered the course of his life. I wish he had spoken to any of us and told us what he was experiencing. But he didn’t.

For years, I felt like I had done something wrong. I _must_ have forgotten to include his PoV or consider his pain.

But now, I realize, he made his decision without us. He wanted to die, and he wanted to spare us the pain of finding him in the half dead state we did.

You didn’t ever do anything wrong. And I hope you can convince yourself that you didn’t have any role to play in this tragedy.

Please DM me if you have any concerns. I will always be available to talk about this with anyone struggling on this topic. <3 No matter how far in the future you find this message.

If you'd met him in person, maybe you, as a fan, could have had some positive effect on him, without necessarily needing to saying anything, much more likely I think than just sending him a message as a stranger which I can't imagine helping. In that way, it's reasonable to not want to scare him off. You were taking the trouble to take a plane to see him, and he did agree to it, so he expected it would be positive too. Sad to hear.

Yeah, I definitely think you're right about this on every single rational level. That said, I think guilt is often an irrational feeling.

I barely knew the guy, and there's a large part of me that knows I did basically everything I could possibly do to help. I wasn't a family member, I wasn't his spouse, I wasn't a childhood friend, I was a dude who had an SA account as a teenager and subscribed to his YouTube channel and found his LinkedIn.

....That said, and I will acknowledge that this isn't the most rational thought that I have ever had, but I do wonder if him saying that to me was a cry for help, like he was reaching out to anyone to show some sort of interest in his well-being.

It's silly, and of course that logic will never end; I'm sure could convince myself that I'm responsible for 9/11 if I tried hard enough.

As I said in a sister thread, I do have an appointment with a shrink in a few days. I am reasonably sure they will either be able to help me or at least will be able to refer me to someone who can.

Don’t let that take hold. You had nothing to do with it and deep down, you know it. If anything, you helped as best you could as some dork who stalked him on LinkedIn.

You have zero fault in this. Survivors guilt is a super common thing and if you're feeling any you should seek out a grief counselor.

Yeah, I have an appointment with a psychologist in a few days. I'll be fine.

The good news is, since it's a feeling, it will fade naturally if you don't actively hang onto it and keep bringing it back to consciousness in order to punish yourself. If you believe the right thing to do was to intervene more decisively than you did, just resolve to take more decisive action the next time you hear something like that. Decide that learning that, was the purpose of the experience. Before learning that, you obviously didn't know it yet, and you did the best you could with what you did know at the time.

It’s not your fault and you should adjust your perspective. The joke is on you! Off brand awful humor that makes light of the worst. It actually seems fitting!