Internet Sites Biased Towards Supporting Suicide

Believe It Or Not, I Care About You writes "According to a new study in the British Medical Journal which examined the search results for various suicide-related search terms, the most common results supported or encouraged suicide. Wikipedia was one of the most prevalent sources of information, particularly on suicide methods, although the Wikimedia Foundation itself does not encourage suicide. Other studies have shown that media coverage has an effect on suicide particularly with respect to influencing the method chosen. Interestingly, this study notes that suicide rates actually decreased with increased Web usage in England, perhaps because support is readily available to anyone who wants it."

Comments

Re:What are you going to search for?

[Jimmy_B]

The question is what is someone considering suicide going to do a search for - suicide, suicide consueling, or suicide methods? They should have asked that question of a bunch of recent suicide attempters first.

They did. From the article, "the researchers collected 12 broad search terms gathered in part from interviews with those who had attempted suicide."

Re:self resolving problem

[Dan541]

Why the fuck is this modded troll?

Slashdot mods really are fuckwits

Alan Turing

[Anonymous Coward]

Lets see a show of hands, how many know how Alan Turing died?

Life often becomes too difficult to continue for some. It is sad but it is reality. To each his own...

Re:Darwinism

[ColdWetDog]

That being said, I do believe that people who genuinely want to die and who have carefully worked out their reasons for this desire, after considering and rejecting the alternatives, should be allowed to do so. In particular, if I were dying of something that would inevitably kill me slowly and painfully (or worse, destroy the person I am long before my body dies, like Alzheimer's) then I would very much hope that I could find a sympathetic doctor to hook me up with some, ah, special medications.

That would be about the only reason I could think to move to Oregon, but it's nice to know that somebody was thinking the problem through.

Re:Out with a bang.

[oostevo]

That's an extremely good question. To the best of my understanding, no, friends and relatives absolutely never use the word "suicide" when referencing someone blowing themselves up in a conflict. It's exclusively considered martyrdom.

The best source I can readily find is a documentary about suicide bombing ("The Cult of the Suicide Bomber", which is excellent, by the way), where the narrator interviews the family of Iran's most celebrated martyr, Mohammed Hossein Fahmideh.

Bob Baer:"I hope you don't mind me asking, but Hossein was the first suicide bomber, wasn't he?"

Family: "No, not at all. Yes, he did have a very strong belief. He was a martyr. It's impossible to describe him as anything else. A martyr through and through."

Bob Baer: [aside] "It's interesting, they absolutely reject the word 'suicide', even though there was a 100% chance that he would die. It just does not come into the vocabulary; he is simply a martyr."

Does that satisfy your curiosity?

Re:No surprise there.

[A Holstenson]

There is data available at http://www.who.int/mental_health/prevention/suicide/country_reports/en/index.html which contains PDFs split by country.

Here is some badly formatted data form the Japan PDF (at http://www.who.int/entity/mental_health/media/japa.pdf )

Number of suicides by age group and gender. JAPAN, 2004.

Age 5-14 15-24 25-34 35-44 45-54 55-64 65-74 75+ All
Males 27 1233 2677 3248 4807 5232 2659 1876 21955
Females 22 579 1088 935 1108 1592 1348 1595 8292
Total 49 1812 3765 4183 5915 6824 4007 3471 30247

The age distribution is interesting with the rate increasing and then falling after reaching the age of 65+. I'm not qualified to make any assumptions based on the data, so I'm leaving that somebody else.

Re:No surprise there.

[darkwhite]

The WHO reports overall suicide rate in Japan to be 36.5/100000 for males and 14.1 for females, versus 17.6 and 4.1 respectively for United States, which averages out to more than 2.5 times higher average suicide rate.

Kamikazes and seppuku committing samurai have nothing to do with modern suicide rates in Japan. Even comparing the age distributions, Japan leads in suicide rates by a wide margin.