Talk:Suicidal empathy

This article is a bit of a mess

Pinging @Simon223:, who's editing the page now as well, and also inviting input from anyone else watching this.

A big problem I'm seeing here is something I've noticed is quite frequent when we're dealing with academic ideas which are frequently engaged with by right-wing debate-bros. Namely, the article does not appear to have been written by people who have actually read and understand the sources. This is not an indictment of anyone, even if you are the sole author of this article, just an indictment of the article itself. I'm going to see if I can get my hands on some of these books to get some context on things, and I'm going to be trying to find some more online sources as well. This article really needs some work. ᛗᛁᛟᛚᚾᛁᚱPants Tell me all about it. 13:39, 12 February 2026 (UTC)

Yeah I found out about it because it was raised on the talk page of another editor who I follow and was alarmed at the state of it too. Thanks for your hard work; frankly I don't know if there is much to salvage here which is why I also nominated it for AfD but, if it survives, it needs to meet our MOS standards and not be a mess of WP:PROFRINGE assertions and questionable citations. Simonm223 (talk) 13:44, 12 February 2026 (UTC)

I just put what I've learned in the deletion discussion. ᛗᛁᛟᛚᚾᛁᚱPants Tell me all about it. 14:20, 12 February 2026 (UTC)

To be clear, part of the mess belongs to me, as the article creator posited about being about "suicidal empathy" as a concept, with the WP:FRINGEy book being the source, and it looked to me for various reasons that it might make a somewhat more reasonable article if it were about the book, so I made changes in the opening to reflect that. Whether the sources discussed in the body address the book, the concept, or anything at all is outside of my knowledge. -- Nat Gertler (talk) 14:03, 12 February 2026 (UTC)

It happens. It can be hard to write about subjects which are mainly discussed by people who have no idea what they're talking about. I meant what I said about my critiques not being an indictment of the authors of this article. I made some changes myself to improve it, and yet I would still say that what I said above applies. ᛗᛁᛟᛚᚾᛁᚱPants Tell me all about it. 14:21, 12 February 2026 (UTC)

I've been doing some scraping, removing things like a source that had one sentence on the topic that didn't support the claims it was againt, claims that were not in listed sources, etc. But it still has a section called "etmology" that adds nothing of significance, Nat Gertler (talk) 18:27, 20 February 2026 (UTC)

I'm good with getting rid of that. I mean, it's clear in a couple of sources that Saad coined the term, but that isn't enough for a full Etymology. I mean, it's just a descriptive term. There's been no change to the language since the term was first used as a proper term to refer to something specific for there to be any need of us to illustrate the etymology. I'm gonna make an edit that I think will improve this a bit. ᛗᛁᛟᛚᚾᛁᚱPants Tell me all about it. 18:31, 20 February 2026 (UTC)

ᛗᛁᛟᛚᚾᛁᚱPants Tell me all about it. 18:31, 20 February 2026 (UTC)

What's your allegience? ~2026-28737-77 (talk) 22:20, 12 May 2026 (UTC)

https://x.com/GadSaad

This guy is a right wing troll who vouches for a Jewish ethno-state in 2026 and openly uses the word RETARD***** to fight people, does not have actual ideas, does not promote peace or bilateral solutions. ~2026-28737-77 (talk) 22:19, 12 May 2026 (UTC)

If you eliminate the polarizing political issues as examples and just relegated it to Saad's definition of the concept the article would be less controversial. Astyanax3 (talk) 21:37, 17 May 2026 (UTC)

Why would we want to do that? Those are the things it was intended to refer to. -- Nat Gertler (talk) 22:20, 17 May 2026 (UTC)

Reception

Add positive as well as negative reception? QR1809Gifford (talk) 14:00, 12 July 2026 (UTC)

Sources? We're not going to assume positive reception exists, nor should we elevate insignificant sources to create a WP:FALSEBALANCE. Gonna need good sourcing. -- Nat Gertler (talk) 14:09, 12 July 2026 (UTC)

"toxic empathy" and "suicidal empathy"

I changed a redirect from toxic empathy which was pointing to this page, as we do not discuss the book here, and there's a small amount of discussion of the page of the author of the book Toxic Empathy. They do seem to be similar concepts, although I don't know that the toxic claim is pointing to suicidality.

There are sources that discuss both books and thus I suppose both concepts under the same larger umbrella, such as this and this. If they are to be covered on the same page, it's not clear that one of them should be the title, or if there is some larger "war on empathy" sort of subject it should be under. -- Nat Gertler (talk) 16:57, 4 August 2026 (UTC)

I was going to suggest just turning both into redirects to Right-wing rhetoric and then creating a subsection there on the concept of critiques of empathy. However That page is, itself, just a redirect to Far-right politics. So... Simonm223 (talk) 17:00, 4 August 2026 (UTC)