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Grassroots suicide prevention in Facebook

June 18, 2010 By Anne Leave a Comment

A Canadian woman’s effort to keep a San Francisco man from committing suicide is becoming something of a movement on Facebook. Days after Kimberly Furnell of Nanaimo, B.C., created a suicide-prevention Facebook group on June 5, it had 47,000 members, the Vancouver Sun reports. She’d seen a message in the anonymous postcard site PostSecret.com that read in part, “I have lived in San Francisco since I was young … I am illegal … I am not wanted here. I don’t belong anywhere. This summer I plan to jump off the Golden Gate.” So she created the group “please don’t jump” “hoping the individual would see it and reconsider, and for anyone who felt as if they did not belong” according to the Sun, which cites the view of an expert as saying that the rapid growth of this group illustrates “how social media can serve as the nexus of deeply emotional and political issues, and how widely used sites such as Facebook are considerably more powerful in connecting people than specialized websites, such as those run by anti-suicide groups.” Activists in suicide prevention, for example at Inspire USA, the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline, Emotion Technology, with whom ConnectSafely.org works strongly agree that support and intervention need to be right at hand on the social Web. Because suicide-prevention experts know from the early days of social networking how powerful peers are as first-responders and life-savers (see this), they are in talks with the most popular social network sites to set up systems for getting the right kind of immediate help to users in suicidal crisis and accurate information to their alert friends. See “A summit for saving lives” and my recent post about Reachout.com.

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Filed Under: Risk & Safety, Social Media, suicide Tagged With: Emotion Technology, Facebook, Facebook groups, Inspire USA, Lifeline, suicide prevention, Suicide Prevention Lifeline

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Anne Collier


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2016 TEDx Talk on
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IMPORTANT RESOURCES

Our (DIGITAL) PARENTING BASICS: Safety + Social
NAMLE, the National Association for Media Literacy Education
CASEL.org & the 5 core social-emotional competencies of SEL
Center for Democracy & Technology
Center for Innovative Public Health Research
Childnet International
Committee for Children
Congressional Internet Caucus Academy
ConnectSafely.org
Control Shift: a pivotal book for Internet safety
Crimes Against Children Research Center
Crisis Textline
Cyber Civil Rights Initiative's Revenge Porn Crisis Line
Cyberwise.org
danah boyd's blog and book about networked youth
Disconnected, Carrie James's book on digital ethics
FOSI.org's Good Digital Parenting
The research of Global Kids Online
The Good Project at Harvard's School of Education
If you watch nothing else: "Parenting in a Digital Age" TED Talk by Prof. Sonia Livingstone
The International Bullying Prevention Association
Let Grow Foundation
Making Caring Common
Raising Digital Natives, author Devorah Heitner's site
Renee Hobbs at the Media Education Lab
MediaSmarts.ca
The New Media Literacies
Report of the Aspen Task Force on Learning & the Internet and our guide to Creating Trusted Learning Environments
The Ruler Approach to social-emotional learning (Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence)
Sources of Strength
"Young & Online: Perspectives on life in a digital age" from young people in 26 countries (via UNICEF)
"Youth Safety on a Living Internet": 2010 report of the Online Safety & Technology Working Group (and my post about it)

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