Slashdot Mirror
Fake Suicide Attempt Tests Facebook Prevention Tool, Lands Man In Asylum
First time accepted submitter abhishekmdb writes Shane Tusch faked his suicide in an attempt to test the authenticity of Facebook suicide prevention tool and got detained for 72 hours. Facebook has rolled out a set of tools to keep a check on its users who are having suicidal tendencies and prevent these users from suicidal attempts. In case some user is having suicidal thoughts and mentions that in the Facebook posts and if a friend of that user reports it to Facebook then a third party will immediately review the post and Facebook would lock the suicidal user's account and the user will be made to read Facebook's suicide prevention materials.
This is a prime example of how NOT to start a career in software testing.
Take someone who is suicidal and crying out for help and to talk with their friends, and you block them from talking to anyone!
Why not just had them a gun?
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
He clearly stated that he intended to take his life. I'm glad he was detained. A first repsonder is not in a position to decide if someone who just threatened suicide is telling the truth or not when they deny it. What if the cops just took him at his word and left? They'd be held liable if he really did intend to knock himself off. If he really WAS just testing FB, the proper thing to do is to alert authorities in advance. Go to the cop shop and discuss the experiment with them BEFORE you go making people legitimately freak out. But I give FB credit for having real people actually review the post instead of relying on computer text-parsing algorithms.
is of course, that you do not own your existence. So if you "threaten" suicide, you may be forced to continue living.
I predict that there will be very little overall objection to this premise in the discussion that follows, as the present culture is rapidly converging toward the complete realization of the nightmare "the personal is the political" in which every aspect of everyone's life is going to be everyone else's business. With the individual a bit player.
Exist, dammit, or we'll put you in prison!
Unless they track them down and go all clockwork-orange on them I don't really see how the user can be "made" to do anything. They can just you know, put down the phone and shoot themselves.
In fact a coworker lost a friend this way last week. Apparently he (the victim) had been talking to his friends about it for hours on FB and then killed himself. I assume this is all actually FB trying to stave off lawsuits, but I don't see that they could do more, nor that they could afford to ignore the issue.
Oh, wait . . .
Five days ago, when SFGate reported this story, it was made quite clear that Tusch's friends were not in on the hoax and took it quite seriously ---
and that someone reported it to the police independently of Facebook.
A mans fake suicide post gets him detained
Deinstitutionalization for most categories of psychiatric patients started around 1950. Psychiatric units are just another specialization in today's hospital.
There are 6 major state hospitals in California which would technically qualify as asylums these days:
Atascadero State Hospital - a hospital primarily for housing the criminally insane (AKA a forensic mental hospital)
Patton State Hospital - a forensic mental hospital
Napa State Hospital - a civil and forensic mental hospital
Coalinga State Hospital - a forensic facility for housing sexually violent predators
Harbor View House - a private civil facility operated by a non-profit
Metropolitan State Hospital - a civil and forensic mental hospital
They are not some place you get sent for a 5150 72 hour hold, and they didn't hold him the full 72 hours in any case, they held him 40 and verified that he wasn't suffering from an altered mental state due to drugs or a disorder. He was either taken to the PES (Psychiatric Emergency Services) unit at San Mateo Medical center, or he was taken to Mills Peninsula Medical Center, which are the San Mateo County designated 5150 receiving hospitals.
In addition, there are two other semi-major facilities, which count a bit more strongly than PES intake facilities for 5150's which are normally handled by regional medical centers, since they deal with longer term holds:
John George Psychiatric Pavilion - which is primarily used for PES 5150's and longer term holds
Langley Porter Psychiatric Institute at UCSF - a psychiatric teaching hospital
Frankly? I'm surprised they took him on it; if he hadn't shown up on their doorstep (he visited the police station for another matter, and admitted to having made the Facebook posting), then they probably wouldn't have. I've had a hard enough time getting services for people who were obviously decompensating or off their meds, in the street in Santa Clara, and the county mental health wouldn't send out a social worker to help them out, unless I basically called the cops on them to have them arrested. There was really no call for that, as they weren't actually hurting anyone, just talking to their voices outside a Subway Sandwich shop or whatever.
But that kind of B.S. attitude would not have flow where I grew up and volunteered: there, they would have sent a social worker. California's mental health services have been going down hill a lot faster than they have in other states.
Who do all these people keep insisting that my actions have to have consequences
Yes indeed, and never mind the being held 72 hours. This is now in his medical records that he's suicidal. For the rest of his life he's going to be denied certain pain killers if he breaks a leg, held for additional time if he does anything that can be remotely identified as suicidal, etc. It might be bad enough he'll eventually kill himself.