Summary
Anyone who, while acting as a helper, invites or accepts private contact (i.e. private reddit chats, or any kind of offsite non-public communication) early in the conversion is showing either bad intentions or bad judgement. Either way, it's unwise to trust them.
Details
"DM me anytime" seems like a kind and generous offer. In general online conversation, this kind of offer often works out fine, and even when it doesn't, it rarely leads to disaster. That's just not true here. Unless and until a solid rapport has been established, it's just not a wise idea. Here are some points to consider before you offer or accept an invitation to communicate privately.
By posting supportive replies publicly, you'll help more people than just the OP. If your responses are of good quality, you'll educate and inspire other helpers. The 1-9-90 rule applies here as much as it does anywhere else on the internet.
People who are at risk for suicide often (justifiably) have a low tolerance for disappointment and a high level of ever-changing emotional need. Unless the helper is able to make a 100% commitment to be there for them in every way, for as long as necessary, offering a personal inbox as a resource is likely to do more harm than good. This is why mental-health crisis-line responders usually don't give their names and callers aren't allowed to request specific responders. It's much healthier and safer for the callers to develop a relationship with the agency as a whole. Analogously, it's much safer and healthier for our OPs to develop a relationship with the community as a whole. Even trained crisis responders are generally not allowed to work suicide-related calls independently. It's partly about availability, but it's mostly about wider perspective and preventing compassion fatigue.
If a helper gets in over their head with someone whose suicide risk escalates, in a private conversation it's much harder for others, including the /r/SuicideWatch moderators, to help. (Moderators can't see chats, which don't belong to any subreddit.)
In our observation over many years, the people who say "DM me" the most are consistently the ones with the least understanding of mental-health issues and mental-health support. We all have gaps in our knowledge and in our ability to communicate effectively. Community input mitigates these limitations. There's no reason why someone who's truly here to help would want to hide their responses from community scrutiny. If helpers are concerned about their own privacy, keep in mind that self-disclosure, when used supportively, is more about the feelings than the details, and that we have no problem here with the use of alt/throwaway accounts, and have disabled all restrictions on account age or karma.
We can't pretend people who want to exploit and abuse others from finding this subreddit. These people do want to hide their deceptive and manipulative responses from everyone except their victims. Many of them are particularly drawn to communities that serve suicidal people because they actually want to feel like they've pushed someone over the edge. If a helper invites an OP to talk privately and gives them a good, supportive experience, they've primed that person to be more vulnerable to abusers. This sort of cognitive priming tends to be particularly effective when someone's in a state of crisis, when people rely more on heuristics than critical reasoning.
If OPs want to talk privately, posting on a wide-open anonymous forum like reddit might not be the best option. Although we don't recommend it, we do allow OPs to request private contact when asking for support. If you want to do this, please keep your expectations realistic, and to have a careful look at the history of anyone who offers to chat before opening up to them.
If you need support and confidentiality is critically important to you, don't trust uncredentialled strangers on the internet with your sensitive information at all, even in a conversation that appears to be private. This is especially true at reddit where it's so easy to create a specific persona for a specific purpose. Your best protection is to ask for support where anyone helping you is subject to community scrutiny and moderation, or use a confidential professional resource (see /r/SuicideWatch/wiki/hotlines). Remember that you don't need to share all your sensitive details to get help and support with your feelings.
We recommend adjusting your messaging settings to disable unsolicited chat requests; you will still be able to allow chats from specific users:
In the official mobile apps
a. Go to your own profile page (tap your user icon to get there) and tap "Settings" b. Tap "Account settings for /u/<<your_username>>"
c. Scroll down and tap "Chat Permissions" d. Set "Allow Chat Requests from" to "Nobody". You can maintain the list of users you'll accept chats from here also.On Desktop in the new/shreddit interface:
a. Click your username in the top right of any reddit screen
b. Click "Settings" on the menu that Pops Up
c. Click the "Privacy" tab d. Click "Who can send you chat requests", choose "Nobody" and edit your list of accepted users if you have people you wish to accept chats from.The chat control option isn't available in the OG/"classic" reddit desktop interface, but if that's your default, you can go to https://sh.reddit.com/settings/privacy and proceed as above. Even though you can't change the settings in OG reddit, they take effect in all interfaces.