Social Media and Suicide: A Review of Technology-Based Epidemiology and Risk Assessment

Pourmand, Ali; Roberson, Jeffrey L.; Caggiula, Amy; Monsalve, Natalia; Rahimi, Murwarit; Torres-Llenza, Vanessa

doi:10.1089/tmj.2018.0203

Cited by 56 publications

(44 citation statements)

References 29 publications

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“…According to recent data from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), suicide is the second leading cause of death for people aged between 10-34 [45] and fourth leading cause for people aged 35-64, escalating the suicide rate in the US by 30% since 1999 1 . Suicide Prevention Resource Center in the US 2 reports that 45% of people who committed suicide had visited a primary care provider one to two months before their death.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Knowledge-aware Assessment of Severity of Suicide Risk for Early Intervention

Gaur¹,

Alambo²,

Sain³

et al. 2019

The World Wide Web Conference

116

158

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Mental health illness such as depression is a significant risk factor for suicide ideation, behaviors, and attempts. A report by Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) shows that 80% of the patients suffering from Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) have suicidal behavior, 5-10% of whom commit suicide. While multiple initiatives have been developed and implemented for suicide prevention, a key challenge has been the social stigma associated with mental disorders, which deters patients from seeking help or sharing their experiences directly with others including clinicians. This is particularly true for teenagers and younger adults where suicide is the second highest cause of death in the US. Prior research involving surveys and questionnaires (e.g. PHQ-9) for suicide risk prediction failed to provide a quantitative assessment of risk that informed timely clinical decision-making for intervention. Our interdisciplinary study concerns the use of Reddit as an unobtrusive data source for gleaning information about suicidal tendencies and other related mental health conditions afflicting depressed users. We provide details of our learning framework that incorporates domain-specific knowledge to predict the severity of suicide risk for an individual. Our approach involves developing a suicide risk severity lexicon using medical knowledge bases and suicide ontology to detect cues relevant to suicidal thoughts and actions. We also use language modeling, medical entity recognition and normalization and negation detection to create a dataset of 2181 redditors that have discussed or implied suicidal ideation, behavior, or attempt. Given the importance of clinical knowledge, our gold standard dataset of 500 redditors (out of 2181) was developed by four practicing psychiatrists following the guidelines outlined in This paper is published under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC-BY 4.0) license. Authors reserve their rights to disseminate the work on their personal and corporate Web sites with the appropriate attribution.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Knowledge-aware Assessment of Severity of Suicide Risk for Early Intervention

Gaur¹,

Alambo²,

Sain³

et al. 2019

The World Wide Web Conference

116

158

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…A study analyzing the social media behavior of adolescents found that the time spent on it was significantly higher among depressed compared to nondepressed adolescents 23 . The finding that teenagers and young adults are more likely to share their suicide risk factors on social media sites than with their doctors 24 highlight the importance of availability of such online venues and the need for harnessing this readily available individualized information to prevent tragedies like suicide. In fact, the analysis of social media content of military personnel who died by suicide compared to deaths from other causes showed that it could not only predict the cause of death but also the timing of suicide 25 …”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Digital conversations about suicide among teenagers and adults with epilepsy: A big‐data, machine learning analysis

et al. 2020

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Epilepsia. 2020;61:951-958. | 951 wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/epi Abstract Objective: Digital media conversations can provide important insight into the concerns and struggles of people with epilepsy (PWE) outside of formal clinical settings and help generate useful information for treatment planning. Our study aimed to explore the big data from open-source digital conversations among PWE with regard to suicidality, specifically comparing teenagers and adults, using machine learning technology. Methods: Advanced machine-learning empowered methodology was used to mine and structure open-source digital conversations of self-identifying teenagers and adults who endorsed suffering from epilepsy and engaged in conversation about suicide. The search was limited to 12 months and included only conversations originating from US internet protocol (IP) addresses. Natural language processing and text analytics were employed to develop a thematic analysis. Results: A total of 222 000 unique conversations about epilepsy, including 9000(4%) related to suicide, were posted during the study period. The suicide-related conversations were posted by 7.8% of teenagers and 3.2% of adults in the study. Several critical differences were noted between teenagers and adults. A higher percentage of teenagers are: fearful of "the unknown" due to seizures (63% vs 12% adults), concerned about social consequences of seizures (30% vs 21%), and seek emotional support (29% vs 19%). In contrast, a significantly higher percentage of adults show a defeatist ("given up") attitude compared to teenagers (42% vs 4%). There were important differences in the author's determined sentiments behind the conversations among teenagers and adults. Significance: In this first of its kind big data analysis of nearly a quarter-million digital conversations about epilepsy using machine learning, we found that teenagers engage in an online conversation about suicide more often than adults. There are some key differences in the attitudes and concerns, which may have implications for the treatment of younger patients with epilepsy. |FALCONE Et AL.

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“…There is the increased risk of media contagion effect, with peer pressure from online forums that are pro-suicide, swaying those who are ambivalent (29). Accessing and utilizing social media platforms can be a huge boon in prevention of suicide, but there are numerous ethical and methodological challenges surrounding privacy in the digital age for clinicians and researchers (30,31).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Suicide, Stigma, and Utilizing Social Media Platforms to Gauge Public Perceptions

Nathan¹,

Nathan

2020

Front. Psychiatry

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Introduction: Suicide, a multifaceted complex outcome that arises from numerous biopsychosocial factors, is a public health concern which is growing in numbers despite valiant prevention efforts. There is still a lot of stigma surrounding suicide that needs to be addressed. Social media is growing exponentially and there are many forums where suicidality is being discussed. As a result, we conducted a brief survey on the perception of suicide on social media platforms of Facebook and Reddit in order to gather more information.Results: Of the 152 respondents, 86% believed that suicide is preventable, and 72.85% believed that it is a person's right to die by suicide. About a third (31.79%) had lost someone close to them to suicide. Respondents who did not think suicide was preventable also viewed suicide as either a sign of strength (42.86%) or a revenge act (33.3%). Those who responded that someone close to them died by suicide believed that the media glorified suicide (56.25%) while those who did not lose someone, did not believe that (66.99%). Women (61%) found social media to be a good platform for people to ask for help while men did not (60.61%). Conclusions:We utilized the social media platforms to gauge the perception of suicide and found among the sample of mostly young white respondents, suicide is not stigmatized, most believed it is preventable and it is a person's right to die by suicide. While women found social media to be a good platform to ask for support, men did not, which is in keeping with the trend that women tend to be more willing to seek help. A third of the group had lost someone close to them to suicide which was the national average, who tended to believe that media glorified suicide. Limitations of this study include the fact that those who respond voluntarily to a survey likely have an interest in the topic, and this might not accurately reflect the public opinion and attitude.

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Social Media and Suicide: A Review of Technology-Based Epidemiology and Risk Assessment

Cited by 56 publications

References 29 publications

Knowledge-aware Assessment of Severity of Suicide Risk for Early Intervention

Knowledge-aware Assessment of Severity of Suicide Risk for Early Intervention

Digital conversations about suicide among teenagers and adults with epilepsy: A big‐data, machine learning analysis

Suicide, Stigma, and Utilizing Social Media Platforms to Gauge Public Perceptions

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