University of Maryland Study of 16,648 Suicide Survivors Finds Pets, Music, and Hope for Tomorrow Kept Them Alive

Thousands of people who once wanted to die say what saved them wasn't therapy jargon or a crisis hotline script: a dog, a song, a TV show they hadn't finished yet.

A study led by Philip Resnik, a computational linguist at the University of Maryland's Department of Linguistics and Institute for Advanced Computer Studies, published in July in the journal Scientific Reports and reported on by CBS News this week during Suicide Prevention Awareness Month, found exactly that.

Where the Data Came From

The research started with a Reddit post in September 2020 asking formerly suicidal people what kept them alive during their darkest moments. Thousands answered. Resnik's team ended up analyzing 16,648 responses, using a computer-assisted method combined with review from mental health experts to sort answers into categories.

Resnik told CBS News he realized the responses were "a really remarkable set of people's stories" and also "potentially an important source of data that we might be able to analyze and help people." His co-authors are psychologist Rebecca Resnik and Jonathan Singer, a social work professor at Loyola University Chicago.

Four Themes, Mostly Small Things

The biggest theme was concern for others. Survivors didn't want to hurt family, friends, or children. Some said they stayed alive because of a pet.

The second theme was sensory pleasure and distraction: music, food, video games, TV series people hadn't finished. The third was what the researchers call positive foresight, the belief that things might look different in the morning, sometimes tied to religious or spiritual belief. The fourth involved negative emotions like fear or anger that held people back from acting.

Rebecca Resnik, a former president of the Maryland Psychological Association, told CBS News the findings already changed how she does risk assessments. She said she now pays closer attention to whether someone has a pet they're attached to, or an event coming up they're looking forward to.

The Honest Limit Here

Most suicide research tracks the path toward a crisis. Fewer studies ask why people didn't die. The standard reasons-for-living questionnaires clinicians use were built decades ago, not from lived experience at this scale, which is what makes this dataset unusual.

The sample has a real limitation the researchers themselves acknowledge: it's a single, self-selected online thread. People who post on Reddit about surviving suicidal crises are not a random cross-section of everyone who's been suicidal. They skew toward people comfortable writing publicly online, likely younger, likely more internet-literate, and self-selected in ways that could shape which "reasons to live" show up most often. That doesn't make the findings worthless. It means the categories are a starting point for further study, not a settled clinical formula.

What CBS Actually Aired

CBS News correspondent Natalie Brand's segment paired the Maryland research with an interview of an unnamed suicide survivor described as being on "a mission to help others." The CBS report, and the identical write-ups that ran on Blink News and Whatfinger News, gave almost no detail on who this survivor is, what their crisis looked like, or what specifically they're now doing to help others. Left the actual research, the part with real data behind it, doing most of the work.

What Comes Next

The Resnik team's approach opens an obvious next step: replicating the analysis with a more representative sample, not just one drawn from a single online forum, and testing whether asking patients directly about pets, upcoming plans, or unfinished hobbies during clinical risk assessments actually changes outcomes. That work hasn't been done yet, according to the study as reported.

Anyone in crisis can call or text 988 to reach the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline, available 24 hours a day, free and confidential.