As a major public health hazard, suicide is one of the leading causes of death worldwide. Suicide idea, appearing before suicide, is the most fatal prospective indicator of committed suicide. Therefore, more and more researchers are interested in exploring the influence factors of suicide idea and how and when they have impact on it. According to the model of risk buffer, Self-esteem is an important protective factor of negative emotion and can weaken people’s suicide idea, rumination and experience avoidance are risk factor that can strengthen people’s suicide idea. Rumination is a kind of response style that people repetitively and passively focus their attention on depressive symptoms and the implications and consequences of this symptoms. Previous studies have demonstrated that rumination was a risk factor of mental health which could aggravate depression and lead to suicide idea. Different from rumination, experiential avoidance is a kind of unhealthy response process which involves excessive negative evaluations of unwanted private thoughts and sensations, an unwillingness to experience these private events, and deliberate efforts to control or escape from them. Previous studies found it was related to depression. In this study, we aimed at exploring the effects of self-esteem, experiential avoidance and depression on the arising of suicide idea. A total of 778 undergraduates and postgraduates were recruited randomly for this study. Acceptance and Action Questionnaire was used to measure experiential avoidance. Self-esteem Scale was used to measure self-esteem. Depression was measured by the depression subscale extracted from the Self-reporting Inventory. Suicide idea was assessed by the ninth item from Beck Self-rating Depression Scale. All the measures were self-reported and attained good reliability and validity. SPSS21.0 and Mplus were applied to analysis the survey data. The results indicated that: (1)The self-esteem can negatively predict suicide idea（β= -0.110，p <0.001）. The higher the self-esteem, the weaker the suicide idea.(2)The depression moderate the relationship between experience avoidance and suicide idea. The experience avoidance can positively predict the depression（β= 0.372，p <0.001）, the higher the experience avoidance, the higher the depression. The depression can positively predict the suicide idea（β= 0.415，p <0.001）.The higher the depression, the higher the suicide idea.(3)The self-esteem can buffer the effect of experience avoidance on suicide idea by negatively predict the experience avoidance（β= -0.330，p <0.001）and the depression（β= -0.428，p <0.001）. The higher the self-esteem, the weaker the experience avoidance and the depression. In summary, the effect of self-esteem, experiential avoidance and depression on the arising of suicide idea was a complicated moderated mediation model. This model provided a systematically and profoundly interpretation about how and when self-esteem, experiential avoidance and depression impact suicide idea. On one hand, the protective factor self-esteem can negatively predict suicide idea, while the risk factor experience avoidance can affect the suicide idea through the depression. On the other hand, Self-esteem could weaken the positive effect of experience avoidance on suicide idea. This study also provided a practical implication that rational coping style and proper self-esteem were very important factors to prevent negative emotion, as well as suicide idea.