Reachout.com: Substantive help site for teens

"We Can Help Us" is the welcoming (and welcome) message of a just-launched suicide-prevention campaign created by the US government's Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA), the Inspire USA Foundation, and the Ad Council. It's great that there are press releases and radio and TV spots will hit the wires and airwaves, but even better is ReachOut.com, a welcoming comprehensive Web site with video and text stories from teens and young adults about difficulties that sparked their suicidal thoughts and how they made their way to support and solutions. The site provides tools and channels for helping oneself (with a direct link to the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline and solid information about suicide, depression, self-harm, eating disorders, and much more), helping a friend get help (by understanding the warning signs and knowing who to contact), and helping others (by submitting one's own story). Suicide is preventable, SAMHSA points out. That's why ReachOut.com is such an important step toward moving suicide prevention into social media. With teens sending or receiving more than 1,300 text messages a month, on average, and the vast majority of teens (82%) using social network sites, very often it's peers who are first to see warning signs (see this bit of social-Web history). According to SAMHSA, "suicide is the third leading cause of death among 15-24 year-olds, following unintended injuries and homicide. While suicides account for approximately 1.4% of all deaths in the US annually, they comprise 12% of deaths among this age group. In 2006, 4,189 people between ages 15 and 24 died by suicide. For every youth who died by suicide, it is estimated that 100-200 attempts are made." It's outstanding that SAMHSA and Inspire USA are getting at underlying causes in this way.

Web community moderator to the rescue

There's help on the social Web. Lloyd Mann, a volunteer moderator for DiabetesDaily.com, a support community on the Web, appears to have saved the life of one of the site's users, the Cleveland Plain Dealer reports. Another user noticed some disturbing posts and contacted the moderator. "Mann communicated with the troubled poster and said the messages were enough to convince him that [the poster] was serious." He and the man who got him involved worked together to figure out the poster's location and contacted the police. For privacy reasons, the police told Mann they couldn't confirm attempted suicide but said the person was ok and Mann had had reason to be worried. See also "Facebook friend saves suicidal teen," "The social Web's 'Lifeline'" about MySpace's role, and last spring's "Summit for saving lives."

Digital risk, digital citizenship

It's becoming increasingly clear that - in a highly participatory environment such as the fixed and mobile social Web - risk and citizenship are directly related. Risk-prevention experts show how online community mitigates risk. Inner thoughts are expressed outwardly, and peers notice a friend in crisis and get help by any means possible. Online social networks are powerful tools for peer help and protection. The National Suicide Prevention Lifeline has data back several years showing how effective social network sites are as sources of referral (see a post of mine from back then, "The social Web's 'Lifeline'").

Helping one another is one vital aspect of digital citizenship. Researchers such as Harvard education professor Howard Gardner (second link below) are now turning up important findings on how youth function in digital communities. Their work is the kernel of the digital citizenship instruction and practice that will increase safety and trust in an environment that increasingly mirrors the "real" world (for youth, the fixed and mobile social Web is not something separate from "real life"). How will digital citizenship increase online safety? It includes the ethics, civility, empathy, social norms, and community awareness that can mitigate aggression and other results of online disinhibition. We know from the work of the Crimes Against Children Research Center at UNH, for example, that "youth who engage in online aggressive behavior by making rude or nasty comments or frequently embarrassing others are more than twice as likely to report online interpersonal victimization" (see their analysis in Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine). In any case, digital citizenship by definition teaches the community awareness that protects individuals, enables collaboration, and promotes civic engagement.

Both of these features illustrate the clearer definition of "online safety" that has emerged since the end of last year, with the help of the Internet Safety Technical Task Force. The ISTTF's report, which summarized all online-safety research to date, showed that 1) not all youth are equally at risk online, 2) the youth most at risk offline - of sexual exploitation, self-harm, suicide, eating disorders, etc. - are those most at risk online, and 3) young people's psychosocial makeup and family and school environments are greater predictors of real-life risk than the technologies they use. Now we're finding that the use of those social technologies is not only not the best predictor of risk, it can be 1) an avenue to help both immediate and enduring and 2) a means for learning and practicing good citizenship.

In other words, yes, dysfunctional, anti-social behavior is acted out online as well as offline but so is the exact opposite behavior - and the latter can be reinforced for the well-being of individuals and society (see "Geeking out for democracy" at media scholar Henry Jenkins's blog.

The two features:

"A summit for saving lives"

"Learning how to navigate virtual communities: Key to digital citizenship"