Effects Of Social Media On Suicide

On average, 19 teens commit suicide everyday (AFSP 1). That equals roughly 7000 deaths each year. The leading cause of suicide in teens is mental health issues, like depression, which is directly linked to things like the brain chemistry, home life, and social media (Tracy 1). Teens who use social media are 13% more likely to feel depressed and attempt suicide than those who do not (Chen 1). As defined by the Merriam-Webster Dictionary, social media is a “form of electronic communication (such as websites for social networking and microblogging) through which users create online communities to share information, ideas, personal messages, and other content (such as videos),” (Merriam-Webster 1). As seen by the definition, social media is not

Vaughan Bell, a British clinical psychologist at the South London and Maudsley NHS Foundation Trust, describes these online communities as a group of people, whether in a chat room or a page on social media, that believes strongly in their “cause” and serve to provide support for their beliefs, whether or not it is deemed healthy by doctors or psychologists (Bell 5). Not all extreme communities are considered bad or unhealthy, but the overwhelming majority of them are harmful. The most common themes in these communities are pro-anorexia, pro-homicide, and pro-suicide. Within the pro-suicide communities, they will provide reasoning and ways to commit suicide, as well as what should be written in their suicide notes. Having a teen being exposed to this type of pressure can be extremely threatening to their physical and mental health. Being the target of the group, the individual may be told that they are a failure, disappointment, etc. so many times, that they will start to believe it and seriously consider

Whether this information is deemed good or bad is questionable. Just by searching “how to kill yourself” on websites like Google and Bing, pages upon pages of websites with articles describing “What is the best way to kill yourself?” and “What is the least painful method of suicide?” are accessible to anybody, even with SafeSearch on. In 2008, a study was conducted by Lucy Biddle, Jenny Donovan, Keith Hawton, Navneet Kapur, and David Gunnel where they did a methodical search of 12 suicide related terms to simulate what a person looking for information on how to kill themselves would find. For each search, they only analyzed the first ten sites that appeared. Approximately half of the websites were pro-suicide and provided details on how to commit suicide (Biddle 1). In another study done by Patricia Recupero, SE Harms, and JM Noble aimed at finding types of resources a suicidal person might find through search engines on the internet. Using five popular search engines and four suicide-related search terms, they collected quantitative and qualitative data about the search results. Suicide-neutral and anti-suicide pages occurred most frequently, with 155 suicide-neutral and 109 anti-suicide out of 373 websites. While pro-suicide resources were less frequent, 41 of the websites, they were undeniably easy to access (Recupero et al. 1). In all, these studies and many more prove that seeking pro-suicide