All jurisdictions that allow assisted dying also have suicide prevention programmes aimed at preventing persons from ending their lives. The provision of assisted dying and efforts to prevent suicide are both ethically motivated. This presents a moral tension: on the one hand, there a service that assists certain people in ending their lives, and alongside this a general duty to prevent people doing so. Reconciling these seemingly contradictory commitments requires identifying a morally significant distinction between people who are commonly described as ‘suicidal’, and those who are deemed eligible for assisted dying. The ‘Joint View’ represents a standard way of drawing this distinction. On this view, assisted dying both respects a person’s autonomy and alleviates their suffering (and so is in line with their ‘best interests’), whereas a decision to suicide is considered to be either not autonomous or against the person best interests. In this presentation, I will consider the empirical basis of this distinction. Firstly, I will show that there is substantial overlap in the epidemiological factors and phenomenological features of suicidal desire and the desire to undergo assisted dying. Then I will outline areas of contrast between these desires with a focus on the differences in each desires’ causal development. Finally, I will suggest that these differences may serve as an empirical basis in support of the Joint View’s conceptual distinction between suicidal desire and the desire to undergo assisted dying in the terminally ill.