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Showing posts with label Suicide Notes. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Suicide Notes. Show all posts

Sunday, October 27, 2013

Tracking Suicide Risk Factors Through Twitter in the US

By Jared Jashinsky, Scott H. Burton, Carl L. Hanson, and others
Crisis  DOI10.1027/0227-5910/a000234

Background:
Suicide is a leading cause of death in the United States. Social media such as Twitter is an emerging surveillance tool that may assist researchers in tracking suicide risk factors in real time.

Aims:
To identify suicide-related risk factors through Twitter conversations by matching on geographic suicide rates from vital statistics data. Method: At-risk tweets were filtered from the Twitter stream using keywords and phrases created from suicide risk factors. Tweets were grouped by state and departures from expectation were calculated. The values for suicide tweeters were compared against national data of actual suicide rates from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Results:
A total of 1,659,274 tweets were analyzed over a 3-month period with 37,717 identified as at-risk for suicide. Midwestern and western states had a higher proportion of suicide-related tweeters than expected, while the reverse was true for southern and eastern states. A strong correlation was observed between state Twitter-derived data and actual state age-adjusted suicide data.

Conclusion:
Twitter may be a viable tool for real-time monitoring of suicide risk factors on a large scale. This study demonstrates that individuals who are at risk for suicide may be detected through social media.

The entire article is here.

Sunday, September 15, 2013

Kansas Sportswriter's "Suicide Website" Is a Troubling Template for 21st-Century Suicide Notes

By Will Oremus | Posted Friday, Aug. 16, 2013
Slate Magazine

Suicide is, generally speaking, a tragic and hideously hurtful act. Martin Manley, a 60-year-old former sports writer and statistician for the Kansas City Star, seems to have been at least vaguely aware of that. But he did it anyway—and left behind a meticulously detailed website explaining virtually every aspect of his decision.


The case is noteworthy not so much because Manley was a semi-public figure—though he was credited with popularizing the NBA’s standard efficiency rating—but because he used technology to intentionally blow open the wall of privacy that typically surrounds suicides. More than 100 people die by suicide on an average day in the United States, and a significant portion of them leave notes for their stricken friends and relatives. Some are vengeful, some apologetic, some maddeningly cryptic. Regardless, most are read only by a small circle of authorities and loved ones. For Manley, confronting friends and family with his death wasn’t enough. He wanted to confront the public at large. He wanted desperately to justify his own life and death—to the world, but perhaps above all to himself.

The entire article is here.

The original site was taken down by Yahoo as it violated their Terms of Service.  Anonymous hosts a "mirror site" for those interested in the content.

Thanks to Gregory Milbourne for the information.

Saturday, February 9, 2013

Budding designer from Paramus left "suicide diary," according to newspaper report.


Englewood-Englewood Cliffs Patch
Originally posted February 7, 2013

A 22-year-old aspiring fashion designer originally from Paramus jumped off the George Washington Bridge Wednesday and left behind a list of five girls she did not want at her funeral, the New York Post reported.

Riders on a jitney bus saw Ashley A. Riggitano plunge from the New Jersey-bound lanes at around 4:40 p.m., the report said. She reportedly left a Louis Vuitton bag containing pages of notes in a "suicide diary" on the bridge walkway.

Riggitano was apparently bullied by friends in the fashion industry, according to the Post report. The girls banned from her funeral were reportedly from work and college.

“All my other ‘friends’ are in it for gossip,” she wrote in the letter, the Post reported. “Never there.”

Riggitano had attempted to commit suicide before, the newspaper reported.

The entire story is here.

Tuesday, August 21, 2012

‘Economic suicides’ shake Europe

By Arianna Eunjung Cha
The Washington Post - Business
Originally published August 14, 2012

Here is part of the article.

So many people have been killing themselves and leaving behind notes citing financial hardship that European media outlets have a special name for them: “economic suicides.” Surveys are also showing increasing signs of mental stress: a jump in the use of antidepressants and illicit drugs, a rise in depression and anxiety among workers worried about salary cuts or being laid off, and an increase in the use of sick leave due to psychological problems.

“People are more and more uncertain about their future, which is leading to a sharp rise in mental health problems,” said Maria Nyman, director of Brussels-based Mental Health Europe, a multinational coalition of mental health organizations and educational institutions.

In recent years, researchers in the United States and elsewhere have repeatedly identified a correlation between suicides and unemployment or other economic distress. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported last year that suicides increased during periods of economic stress, including the Great Depression, the oil crisis of the 1970s and the double-dip recession of the 1980s. Other studies have estimated that people with employment difficulties are two to three times as likely to commit suicide than the population as whole.

The entire story is here.