I really wanted to avoid posting this on meta and avoid drawing too much attention to it, but I've flagged the question in question yesterday and no action was taken. I checked the moderation rules; they say to flag anything that seems weird, exceptional or in any way deserving moderator attention, and this definitely seemed like it to me.
In this post, an extremely demoralized PhD student is asking for advice on how to retain his motivation and continue. The question is not particularly good but I sympathised with the situation so I followed it. The OP didn't seem particularly receptive to advice given, and mentioning additional difficulties and hardships in comments, but that is their own choice.
Through comments he expressed he is thinking of changing labs and Universities again (which would be his second switch), and various advice popped up about how switching for the second time might be even harder than the first time and possibly not the best idea. Then the OP responded by saying that is a really bad break, he saw that as his only choice and is now contemplating suicide.
To me, that was extremely alarming. Alarming, for one, out of the concern about the OP, his health and his well-being. Distressing for me to witness it. But, even moving away from the personal level (of just seeing somebody threatening with suicide), the result for Academia.SE is that we have a question about how to get out of a demoralizing PhD situation, ending on the note that (as a result of the advice given on this platform), the OP is now contemplating suicide. Surely this is not the message we want to send: that such a demoralizing situation has no solution and leads to something as drastic as that.
It's been more than 24 hours now, and I do think something should be done about that comment standing there. The OP is probably in a delicate state, so sending a message we do not care about what he has to say and deleting it might not be the right approach, and I don't know what is, so I am asking here:
Especially seeing that we get a lot of questions from people in very stressful, demoralizing and bad situations, should we, and how should we as a community, react when an OP shares that they are contemplating harming themselves?