On the Internet, there are not only online communities that are pro-suicide, but there are Web sites that actually encourage visitors in efforts to commit suicide. Some even offer detailed, step-by-step instructions, according to a study by Butler Hospital President and CEO Dr. Patricia R. Recupero.
“That is something that I don’t think the general public is aware of,” Recupero said last week in an interview. “And I think it’s something that parents, in particular, need to be aware of because suicide risks remain quite high among late-stage adolescents in particular. And, of course, they’re the ones who are on the Internet the most in our society.”
In its June issue, The Journal of Clinical Psychiatry published Recupero’s 11-page paper, “Googling Suicide: Surfing for Suicide Information on the Internet.” The results come from a two-month research period during 2006.
Recupero and Brown University research assistants Samara E. Harms and Jeffrey M. Noble used five search engines – Google, Yahoo!, Ask.com, Lycos and Dogpile – for results on four topics: “suicide,” “how to commit suicide,” “suicide methods,” and “how to kill yourself.” Of the search results on each of the engines, the team culled the first 30 results and checked them. Each site was given a code – ranging from pro-suicide to neutral to anti-suicide.
The study found 41 Web sites that were pro-suicide. In the 616 total search results, those pages came up 99 times. And although they’re not a huge percentage of the total Web sites found – they were 11 percent of the study’s Web sites – they are “easily accessible,” Recupero said.
The searches found 109 anti-suicide Web sites and 115 neutral Web sites. Other Web sites, such as ones that were rock band’s homepages or those that linked to movies or novels with “suicide” in the title, were rated as “not a suicide site.” There were 74 such sites found.
Of the top recurring Web sites that the study found, the top two – both with nine occurrences – were drastically different from each other. One was a “layperson’s” site that attempted to “dissuade the viewer from committing suicide.” The other, according to the published study, was the Church of Euthanasia’s “A Practical Guide to Suicide,” which offers detailed steps for committing suicide.
Recupero called that Web site “bizarre” and “frightening.” The group’s motto is “Save the planet – kill yourself.”
Another Web site boasted 14 “success stories,” where members had committed suicide. The study noted that during 2005, a man in Oregon was arrested for organizing a mass-suicide pact with 32 members online.
While such Web sites were obviously pro-suicide, there were other instances when the study could have slightly erred, the report noted. “It is telling that some of the neutral sites were rated as pro-suicide by one reviewer and anti-suicide by another,” it states in its final discussion. “The impact of these sites is likely to vary depending upon what the seeker hopes to find.”
Some Web sites, the study notes, were pro-suicide but advocated “death with dignity” and suicide only in some circumstances. Those groups, including the Euthanasia Research and Guidance Organization, support “physician-assisted suicide or voluntary euthanasia for individuals with terminal illness or other debilitating and incurable illnesses, the study said.
At least two researchers classified each site. “And I can tell you that the ones that were classified pro-suicide were clearly pro-suicide,” Recupero said last week.
The study, though useful for the psychiatric profession, doesn’t necessarily relate to the day-to-day operations at Butler Hospital, Recupero said. There, computer access is very limited: in the Child and Adolescent wing, there are two computers that patients can use under supervision and the other wings don’t have computers, Recupero said.
“We do have a patient information center that patients and their families can go down to” but access to those computers also requires staff assistance, she added.
For Recupero and other psychiatrists, regulating computer use isn’t part of the profession, Recupero said. For that reason, she said it’s growing increasingly important for practicing psychiatrists to make it a point to ask patients about their Internet use.
“It may be that people are not expressing to other living human beings that they have suicidal thoughts, but they’re actively seeking this information out on the Internet,” she said.
And, of course, parents should take notice of Web use, she added. At home, there are Web-blocking programs that parents can buy. But those programs “might give you a false sense of security, when the Internet is a rapidly evolving and changing place,” she said. “The kinds of sites that might be blocked by the engine might not be blocked if you use different words to search them out.”
During the last 10 years the number of Web sites has “grown dramatically,” she said. That’s been accompanied by growth in technology, such as Web cameras, that allow new uses – one group of Web surfers watched another surfer commit suicide, Recupero’s study found.
“We’ve seen new versions of the dangers,” she said.
A similar study, completed in 2001 by other researchers, found only 75 suicide-related Web sites. None of those sites provided instructions for ending your own life, according to Recupero. •
