Sadly, the story that broke last week about a Florida college student and bodybuilder who blogged and filmed his suicide to the chants and derision of his online audience isn't really that unique. Stories abound of people who find information about suicide methods online as well as a ready audience and community of like-minded people.
During the summer I spoke at a conference in New Zealand on the topic of online safety for our children. The opening remarks were poignantly supplied by grieving parents whose adult daughter had committed suicide after using a common search engine to find a suitable method for ending her life. Their plea was for the international web community to find a way to guide distraught online people to suicide prevention services and mental health professionals. A simple Google search on "killing yourself" returns a shocking 633,000 results. Searching on "suicide methods" has the even sadder result of the Google helper feature offering suggested alternative phrasing as "How to Commit Suicide" and "How to Kill Yourself" at the top of the list. Mr. and Mrs. Neville Gates' request is that Google and other search providers simply add a button instead to the top of the list that would link the troubled person to real help instead of destructive encouragement.
Whether it's online shouts of the equivalent of "jump" or technology that pushes desperate people closer to self-harm, our online world lacks a "sensitivity chip" to paraphrase a celebrity. We need to become both more caring when online and figure out how we can rid ourselves of these dangerous gaps in our online experience.