- Richard wants to kill himself and would like to know
whether anyone has any experience of self-strangulation. He has put the
question to an Internet chat room, and he is serious. "How long should
this take before becoming unconscious?" he asks. "Is it likely
to work? I tried it last night but after about a minute nothing seemed
to be happening except for the pain in my neck ..."
-
- Wiley, also in the chat room, replies: "I think
that you would pass out and not be able to continue applying the pressure
necessary." Richard is not satisfied by this: "Surely if I tied
the rope tight enough it would work?" he persists. "OK, that's
hanging yourself," says Wiley. "I thought you were talking about
using your hands. Hanging is a time-proven method of suicide."
-
- This conversation took place on an electronic noticeboard
attached to a website that explains how to commit suicide and reassures
young people who are contemplating it that killing themselves is a positive
choice.
-
- The information it gives is wide-ranging, detailed and
explicit. There is a video film's transcript of a man talking viewers through
his exit; there are diagrams designed to ensure that suicide attempts succeed;
there is advice on exiting in a group, which is said to "help reduce
anxiety". And there are testimonies contributed by dozens of unhappy,
isolated young people, all intent on sharing their pain with those of a
similar disposition.
-
- On Wednesday in the US it was revealed that Brandon Vedas,
a 21-year-old computer technician from Phoenix, Arizona, was encouraged
to overdose on five different drugs by a group of virtual friends watching
him via his webcam as his mother did the crossword in the next room. A
transcript of Vedas's hour-long chat shows how they egged him on until
the last minutes of his life. They grew alarmed. In the end they panicked,
wondering whether they had been accomplices in his death.
-
- The chat room, used mainly by drug users who traded tips
on how to fake symptoms to get prescriptions for drugs, hosted the likes
of Yoda, Smoke2k and Pnutbot. "I told u I was hardcore," were
the last coherent words Vedas managed to type.
-
- Set in the context of a suicide website, his death, which
occurred on January 12, remains shocking, but it is also unsurprising.
Most participants in suicide websites feel unloved and already seem to
be contemplating suicide, or have attempted it, and there is plenty of
advice on how not to be talked out of it.
-
- IT is estimated that thousands of such death sites now
exist on the unregulated Net. In 1998 an authoritative report suggested
that there were 9000. And a number of teenagers have killed themselves
after announcing their intentions online. Markus B, a young German, first
declared his interest in suicide on the Net when he was 16. By the time
of his death at 18 he had become a cult figure on the website. On November
11, 2000, his final message read: "Everything went well in the gun
shop. I picked up my weapon today (300DM (deutschmarks) is really reasonable)."
Three days later he set the Beatles song Let it Be to play continuously
in his bedroom and locked the door. When his parents came home and went
up to look for him they found their son dead. He had shot himself in the
head.
-
- It is impossible to know how many young people are using
suicide sites but it is clear the Internet attracts those most prone to
suicide: young men. In Australia, suicide rates for young men aged 15 to
24 trebled between 1960 and 1990. The rate is nearly twice as high for
those living in remote areas compared with capital cities.
-
- Flinders University psychiatry professor Ross Kalucy
says he is not amazed by the recent US cybersuicide, nor the bizarre coercing
behaviour of Internet bystanders. "It's not surprising that they could
egg him on to more outrageous behaviour because this boy would have been
already somewhat suicidal and this became the venue in which he could follow
through."
-
- Kalucy says there is a tendency among people to treat
Net exchanges as unreal, which can lead to the absence of a sense of responsibility
or a diminishing of moral standards.
-
- On numerous suicide audits he has discovered computer
messages sent by those who died
-
- to cyber friends indicating their intention to commit
suicide, and nothing was done to prevent it.
-
- "In the schoolroom setting when a kid is clearly
miserable and says they are thinking about suicide, usually other kids
will tell the school counsellor or the teacher, but in the virtual world
it seems like the dimensions of concerns and responsibility are suspended
or do not exist," says Kalucy.
-
- In the Arizona case, the live webcam added to the pressure
of following through a suicide threat: "If you're being watched, it's
like losing face and they feel that they are committed."
-
- He says the computer game culture of "1000 deaths
per minute" is contributing to a cyber era of insensitivity to issues
such as suicide.
-
- "I'm not saying that violent computer games lead
to violence in the outside world, but what I am saying is that while we
are watching something on a screen, we can surrender many values,"
says Kalucy.
-
- University of Queensland child psychiatry professor Graham
Martin says myriad Internet sites featuring suicide had made the act commonplace:
"If I'm feeling down and I get on to the Internet and type 'suicide'
into a search engine I will find something like 300,000 sites that mention
suicide.
-
- "That would suggest to me that this is just normal,
everybody feels suicidal some time or another, so it sort of gives me permission
instead of saying this is something grossly abnormal and I need help."
-
- Martin, who will head an international conference in
Brisbane later this year on the Internet, media and mental health, says
the Internet poses a different dilemma to the reporting of suicide in the
more traditional print and broadcast media because journalists should have
some moral judgement.
-
- "But the Internet has no gatekeeper," he says.
-
- The Australian
-
- http://www.news.com.au/common/story_page/0,4057,5947888%255E13762,00.html
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