Around the world, the number of suicides exceeds that of deaths in combat, murder, and vehicular accidents. The active development of informational technologies gives the topic of suicide wide notoriety and in doing so increases the number of people drawn into this topic, passively or actively, and also increases the number of people involved in discussion about it.
Staff and students of the department of clinical psychology Tatiana Bryabrina, Anna Shtrakhova, and Anna Gibert carried out research on references to suicide in special groups of one of the most famous social media sites. The researcher determined the psychological factors which consistently confirm the risk of users committing suicide in contrast to those who can also discuss this online. The analysis was carried out using electronic resource and specialized computer programs analyzing the content of a text.
The content analysis considered comments on social media by young men and women from 13.5 to 22 years old among those who committed suicide and those who mentioned it online (including mentioning wanting to commit suicide) but did not do it. According to the researchers, suicide is a cry for help and a person who has decided to take their own life is inclined to make real and informative mentions of it. Words, phrases, and context replicas of those who commit suicide helped the researcher determine a few common behaviors. They found the most common words among both groups such as kill, love, die, meaning of life, angel, and more. Analysis of post by young men and women in these groups allowed the researchers to determine the different frequencies of these words’ use and the various contexts of use.
Discussion about the meaning of life and self-understanding was rarely found on the pages of actively suicidal individuals. At the same time, the life of young people who discussed the topic of suicide, but did not make suicidal attempts, is more meaningful and emotionally-charged. Their pages included statements which reflected a search for joy from life: enjoy life to the fullest, while suicidal individuals did not tend to find a source of joy in the real world.
Roughly 85% of suicidal individuals avoid comments about the surrounding world. According to the researchers, they prefer to live in a mentally-constructed world. It is characteristic for many of them to obsess about anime, computer games, and heavy rock, and there were phrases such as: “I would like to live in the internet,” and “My dream is to go into the world on the monitor”.
On the other hand, both groups tended to place more significance on their friends and trust them. However, suicidal individuals mention a lack of friendly conversation and speak of their parents as something that doesn’t allow them to “go”: “Live for parents’ sake”, “I want to die but I feel for my mother”.
In the young peoples’ statements an aggressive relationship towards actions that, psychologically, reflect not just a wish to be dead but also show aggressiveness towards others.
The topic of love was the most charged for both groups – the tie between the idea of life and love is a meaningful and powerful resource for coping with problems.
On the whole, the accounts’ texts contain proof of the higher sensitivity of these young people, the romanticization of their ideas of life and death, an interest in the “darker” side of life, and a tendency towards discussing abstract ideas.
The data from this research can serve to improve means of predicting suicidal measures and providing help to young people with a high risk of suicidal activities.
«Many questions remain after this pointed research. For example, it necessary to create digital instruments to monitor such content – who will keep track of it? If parents do, isn’t that an infringement on the child’s rights. If not, then how can access to these groups be offered to parents, teachers, and psychologists? In doing so, will we not drive the issue deeper down? We completed research which only showed one side of the issue and only used one instrument for such content analyses,” says candidate of medical sciences, head of the department of clinical psychology of the SUSU Higher School of Medicine and Biology, Michael Berebin.
Suicidal activity increases dramatically at 14 to 15 years old and peaks at 16 to 19. It is believed that more than half of suicidal attempts among teens are for show, however it is not always easy to differentiate real suicide attempts and those that are for show.
“If we are speaking about universal methods for preventing such things, they are trivial – they are simultaneously helpful to everyone and no one. The child must understand that he is loved, cared for, and someone needs him. There needs to be a distinct way to build trust and openness among parents and children. This is the universal ‘recipe’, but the application of it is individual to each separate case,” says Michael Alekseevich.
Topics relating to discussing the themes of life and death are some of the oldest, and the idea of the finiteness of our being is one of the necessary stages of growing up. It is impossible to bypass this topic and the formation of the concept of self in a person’s individual development, just as we mustn’t forget what human life ends with.
Often, socio-economic issues contribute to the statistics on suicidal activity of the economically-active portion of society from 30 to 45 years old, while social problems contribute to the deaths of older individuals.
In addition, low or lowered self-esteem, lack of self-confidence, a high need for personal fulfillment, difficulty in decision-making, a high level of anxiety, a lowered level of optimism and activity in difficult situations, tendencies to blame oneself, low independence, a lack of socializing, infantilism, and immaturity are considered typical for suicidal individuals.
On the other hand, suicidal activity is not a fully controllable factor of mortality rate; that is, it is not a problem which society can influence with predictable results and the commercialization of resources. At the same time, researchers of the SUSU HSMB see a solution in the tracking of potentially dangerous content and systematic work with individual risk groups, including help centers, and the creation of recommendations for parents from research staff.
In addition, in contrast to article 110 of the legal code, Incitement to Suicide, which includes direct calls for action, responsibility for the instigation of suicide, for now, lies outside the law. Work on lowering the level of suicidal activity, according to the researchers, is a large governmental task and, to an extent, is an issue of national security.
You can find out more about the results of this research here.