Do not promote suicide on the internet

Just don’t

I recently posted about how I lost my best friend due to suicide when people were talking about a celebrity suicide that happened a week ago.

However today I saw another post on a popular news website how a girl has committed suicide after she has had a bad relationship.

Suicide is a public health problem all over the world, more than 30 000 suicide deaths in the United States and nearly 1 million suicide deaths worldwide occur every year.

The thing about suicides are that they can go viral, which means when someone has thought about committing suicide and when they see someone else committing suicide or see news about it they also feels the urge to do the same.

It is scientifically proven that news about suicide tend to increase the number of people committing suicide in that country or region.

It is sad to see news websites and social media pages like to share news about suicide to increase their page views.

So what can people do about it?

There is increasing evidence that the Internet and social media can influence suicide-related behavior.

If you see a posts and news articles about suicides, don’t share it on your wall or on Twitter, don’t comment do anything that will increase the engagement with the post, as it will show the post to even more people.

Just leave it alone and pretend as you have not seen it. The more attention and engagement we give to such posts the more news we will see about suicides in future.

Instead of promoting posts about suicide if you come across someone whom you think is about to do an act of self harm, make sure he or she gets the attention she deserves and help them by connecting them with a professional counsellor who will help them in their problems.

If you think someone is suffering from depression don’t wait, help to get in touch with a psychiatrist as depression is a disease with treatment. Use social media in a way to prevent suicide than promoting it.