People with borderline personality disorder sometimes make kind of vague suicidal sounding threats to get attention. They also will make half-hearted suicide attempts for the same reason. If you don’t know this person well, it’s probably best to just remove them from your friend list or ignore them. People with this personality disorder simply live for drama and you will get worn out from just reading their status updates.
If someone you knew well and loved much posted something like this, I’d call the police and request a wellness check. This way you are not ignoring the suicide threat, but you aren’t giving them the spotlight of attention they are craving. It’s for their own good, as each time they succeed in getting attention from a suicide threat, they up the ante and will do more drastic things to get the same rush they got the first time. It’s now almost commonly believed that Sylvia Plath’s suicide was accidental. She had a history of threatening suicide and attempting it only when she knew that she’d have an audience to rescue her. Unfortunately, she made all the calls but accidentally locked the door so people couldn’t come in and save her on time.
Out of all of the mental health disorders, I think borderline is the toughest for friends and loved ones to deal with. It’s basically the need to be really nasty to those you love the best and stir up insane drama on a constant basis. Suicide threats are just a very easy way to get lots of attention.
But because they also attempt suicide, police wellness checks are important. The police can assess the situation and give them help if they need it, but won’t feed into their drama fix. My husband does this with his own BPD clients and sometimes I think it’s the only way he gets any time off at home.