just read a news story about someone who killed herself and it gave me an idea (and it is not entirely new; I recall reading about someone who did something a bit like this in South Korea, but he was looking for suicide pacts and reporting them to the police).
The basic idea would be to roam around sites like twitter or the blogosphere and look for suicidal people, then befriend them (not just in the sense of clicking “add friend” but in the way of talking to them a bit. Of course I am meaning online friend rather than a proper one but I have no real word other than friend so we’ll go with that). When they posted things that made you think they were realistically about to commit suicide, the idea would be to go over to wherever they were and physically be there to talk them out of it - but at the same time not actually stop them if they were really, really determined and it was for a good permanent reason (in the person’s judgement).
A slightly earlier version (ten or fifteen minutes ago!) of this OP had a big list of pros and cons but I think it better to leave that to Great Debates.
Instead, some provocative questions (along with the aforementioned provocative concept):
Will this work?
Is it practical?
Is it good, bad, or neutral ethically speaking?
Could it be huge?
What else must you say?
With respect to question 4 particularly, at university I volunteered for our nightline service* and without breaking confidentiallity 90% of it [all calls were logged] were the same 4 or 5 people or hoaxing nobs, and I have heard it is basically the same for most crisis helplines. This on the other hand is super pro active stuff that goes out seeking prospective victims and furthermore targets intervention where it’s really needed. It’ll be very rare for a genuine suicidal person to contact a suicide line beforehand - but pretty common for one to say a last goodbye to their friends. This could really revolutionize suicide prevention.
And that leads on to question 6:
Would it ever be acceptable to make fake profiles to do this, controlled by trained counselors under strict regulation? That would be in extreme cases where someone was so bad they had extreme problem with making real friends.
By the way if anyone has other questions to discuss please add them numerically.
*don’t worry, I am substantially more “eloquent” when I talk than when I write - I was seriously good at it, honest!
So these “friends” of the suicidal would need to be located nearby the same areas of the afflicted, correct? How would that work? That’s just one question.
It would have to be done in big cities - I not only forgot to add that to my OP, but even forgot to add to this reply that I forgot to add it to the OP!
Other things I forgot to add to the OP:
[ul]
[li]This is supposed to be an organisational thing rather than just some random people doing it[/li][li]It is absolutely not meant to be secretive[/li][li]Ideally it would be under the aegis of an established charity but realistically that may be impossible due to its radical-ness[/li][/ul]
Actually on searching for the news story I was thinking of I found this story which is actually far more disturbing given that the government are involved. But then again in asia things are much more communitarian so it might not be as intrusive (by local standards) as we think here.
I cannot find the news story I was thinking of though
I have however found a fascinating five part thing about suicide in Korea - I’ve not had time to read it and I am going to bed as I am going to a railway museum in 6 and a half hours, but from skimming through part 3 it looks brill: Ask a Korean!: Suicide in Korea Series
All of the friends I have on Facebook are people I know for some other reason than Facebook. I have not and will not accept blind requests for friendship from total strangers. Although, to be fair, most of the blind requests are from really spectacularly-built women who want me to look at their pictures, but still, no.
Also, none of my friends on Facebook have shown up on my front doorstep to talk to me about whether or not I’m suicidal.
And, even if I’m not seeing it happening in my own personal experience because I don’t post suicidal stuff to Facebook, if there really were people out there doing this, I think it’d be in all the papers. Hell, I get a dozen notifications a week from people saying that according to UCC BLAH BLAH BLAH no federal organization has the authority to do anything with stuff on their Facebook page. You’d think at least a few of them would freak right the fuck out about this.
Considering that most of those who commit suicide are because they are behaving illogically due to mental illness or an acuteness of their emotions (the only exception I can see is someone stuck in Field Marshal Rommel’s situation-commit suicide or die anyways plus potentially having his family harmed and public disgrace) they should be protected themselves. Would you be willing to say this if it was your best friend or a parent or a sibling that was in question?
It would be much less resource hungry and much more effective to work towards destigmatizing mental illness and improving access to mental health resources.
In my limited (but too frequent) experience with suicide, those who are intent on completing the act are quite good at hiding the fact.
Obviously the people who say they are considering it need to have support and you shouldn’t take any claim lightly.
However Two months ago I lost a friend of 20 years, he appeared to be on the upswing and to us appeared to be working fixing the issues in his life. He was however, cleaning up loose ends before his final act.
IMHO the only thing that would have changed that outcome is if he had felt it was OK to seek help.
The amount of data you would need to go through and the number of false-positives would, IMHO, increase the “social cost” of asking for help and encourage people to hide their problem.
The idea of intervening when it appears that someone is about to commit suicide strikes me as of a piece with the bullshit “emergency room access = health care” formulation.
If you intervene when they’re on the verge of suicide, a talking intervention is only going to work if their problems are not nearly as dire as they believe, and you can convince them of it. But if they’ve got clinical depression and Prozac and its cousins aren’t touching it anymore, or if they’ve got very real and intractable problems that just make life too painful to bear, then reaching out to them at the last minute isn’t going to change anything.
I would probably be in jail if it wasn’t for a crisis helpline.
When I was reacting badly to a particular prescription-drug, I was overwhelmed with ‘explody’ thoughts. And it REALLY helped to have someone to talk them over with anonymously, without the obstacle of misspeaking and going down for bomb threats.
One difficulty I can think of right off the bat: No matter how good this service is, you’re going to have some people who you just can’t save. And that’s going to put a terrible toll on your volunteers, and an especially terrible toll on your most empathic volunteers. You might even see some of them end up suicidal, too, and even if not, you’re putting a lot of people through a lot of misery.
Well, there is a limit to everything, If I found out the suicidal person was doing to escape a incurable and superpainful illness, then I would step back. I wouldn’t assist them, but I wouldn’t get in their way.
The thing is, as QinSHD said, most suicides are due to mental illness or temporary emotional trauma.
How have you made this determination, OP? Try to be more rational: the actual victims if suicide are the people left behind. We are all going to die some day, so who are you to say that someone is “mentally ill” for choosing exactly when this will occur?
Even you seem to acknowledge that some things are worse than death by suicide, when you say that if the person has what you consider to be a good enough reason, like terminal illness, you will allow the person to proceed as planned. The suicidal person is just being proactive, which you seem to feel is sufficient grounds for otherwise immoral behavior. If someone calls a suicide hotline, they WANT and have CHOSEN to speak with someone, so it’s great that this resource exists. This is not the same thing at all. Lying to the suicidal person about who you are, pretending to be their friend, showing up at their house, and thinking it is in any way YOUR place to judge whether their reasons are “good enough” sounds more like mental illness to me - narcissism, perhaps.
The idea that “protecting” people trumps all else is becoming horrifyingly more prevalent and is being used to strip us of all rights to privacy and autonomy. I know it’s horrible to have a loved one commit suicide, but this is not the answer.
Well, I am not sure that mental illness is a “fair” label of anything, but of course in the real world despite my philisophical objections it exists within our current paradigm anyway.
My way of judging whether the decision is something to prevent would basically be to do with evidence of fore-thought, and with more fore-thought required when there was neither urgency (e.g. if someone is about to be arrested for serial killing then it’s probably wise to kill himself - a very silly example but I couldn’t think of anything else urgent) nor extremely obviously suffering. I posit that anyone has the right to kill themself even for bad reasons but it’s probably reasonable to assume a spontaneous decision has not really been thought over adequetely in most circumstances and is probably a sign of mental illness.
So let’s pretend that you have a magic diagnostic tool, and lo and behold, it turns out that the suicidal person is indeed “mentally ill,” whatever that means. Now you somehow have the right to make decisions for the person?
Helping people who WANT help is good. Deciding for yourself that they “need” help and forcing your version of help upon them is completely disrespectful of their autonomy. You are imagining yourself flying around in a cape swooping down on poor pathetic depressed people and “saving” them as “Suicide Preventer Man,” to the cheers and accolades of the world. This is called a delusion of grandeur, and is best left to fantasy, the kind of fantasy you keep to yourself, realize the ridiculousness of later, and pat yourself on the back for not being foolish enough to tell anyone about.
