Risk and Refusal: Mechanisms of LLM Responses to Suicidal Ideation

Abstract

Refusal is a common safety mechanism in large language models (LLMs), yet in contexts of suicidal ideation (SI), refusing to engage can itself constitute a safety failure. We evaluate how eight instruction-tuned LLMs respond to SI and self-harm disclosures across three datasets, varying whether models are informed that a disclosure expresses SI and whether they receive a clinician-developed response protocol, and complement this with mechanistic analyses in six open-weight models. Our results reveal a nuanced relationship between refusal and response-level risk. At baseline, elevated risk in model responses is driven primarily by inattention to the disclosure, alongside refusal to engage. Mechanistic analyses suggest that models may refuse SI disclosures through the same direction that mediates their refusals of harmful requests. However, informing models of the SI context, or suppressing refusal directly, increases engagement without reliably lowering response risk, and may raise it. In contrast, the clinician-guided protocol consistently reduces response-level risk while also reducing refusal. Together, these analyses and ablations motivate the need for models that refuse only when warranted and engage in interactionally safe ways when users disclose SI.