Suicide hotlines

[liv]

This post is primarily about social media etiquette and fake news, but the topic is suicide so it's going behind a cut.

It's become a bit of an internet norm to post lists of suicide hotlines whenever the topic of suicide is mentioned, or just randomly to show that you're a nice person who cares about people with severe mental illness getting the support they need. The impulse is a kind one but it's easy to exploit; some of it is just passing on chain letters, which are fake just like all other chain letters are fake. Repost this to show you care / I bet hardly any of my friends will repost this is just blatant emotional manipulation, and when it's accompanied by Copy and paste this status, don't just reblog it, that's a big red flag, it's almost certainly just like-farming.

Also, posting a list of international hotline numbers copied from somewhere on the internet means it's unlikely that anyone in the chain has actually verified that the numbers are real, still current, and link to real organizations that are actually helpful and not dodgy, scammy, or liable to cause further harm by being prejudiced against some callers. Even if you know that the number is accurate, hotlines are not necessarily a good source of support for everyone who needs help. For example, the best-known UK charity that runs a suicide hotline is the Samaritans, and they have a really bad track record on confidentiality. They also have a principle that they won't actually intervene to prevent a suicide or call for medical help, they only listen. Which, ok, that might be something that some people want, I'm not saying it's a bad principle, but if you're trying to save lives then be aware that that's not what the Samaritans do.

A second problem is that there are a lot of spurious claims floating about that "the pandemic" has led to an increase in suicides, or a doubling in suicides, or a massive secondary pandemic of mental health problems. This certainly seems plausible; the pandemic is unquestionably bad for people's mental health. But these claims don't seem to have any factual basis and some journalists believe that they originate from intentional misinformation campaigns, from the dodgy groups that are pro-virus, anti-lockdown, anti-mask and want lots of people to die to achieve what they incorrectly term herd immunity. Suicide prevention and mental health charities have denied these plausible-sounding factoids and consider them unhelpful.

I don't have a link to back this up that is both recent and UK-based, but:

There is currently no evidence for a 200% increase in suicides under lockdown. It is unclear where this figure has come from.. [Fullfact.org, UK June 2020]

An untrue tweet about suicide spiralled out of control from an account devoted to posting ultra-partisan right-wing content, with posts praising Donald Trump and calling for the abolition of the UN. [NZ, May 2020]

Widespread assumptions that suicide rates would increase during the pandemic are not supported by evidence [Canada, Feb 2021]

All three articles note that the same viral misinformation patterns are seen internationally, and all note the difficulties of counting suicides in real time. These together make me suspicious of more specific-sounding claims restating the same facts about a different country or demographic.

There are people known to me personally who have lost loved ones to suicide during the pandemic. I am not saying that everything is fine and all the mental health harms are made up by far-right pro-virus propagandists. But I would advise people to be at least somewhat skeptical; if someone is talking about people experiencing mental health problems as a result of the pandemic, and the proposed solution is more investment in resources to support people before they reach crisis point, that's one thing, but if the proposed solution is that we should ignore or abandon all physical public health measures designed to prevent transmission of infectious disease, then the supposed concern for mental health is probably fake. And a lot of the, Pandemic bad! Suicide on the increase! Please repost these hotlines! social media messages are firmly in the second category.

Comments

[minoanmiss]

Well said. *applauds this post*

[adrian_turtle]

I'd like to second what you said about the dangers of passing along specific suicide-prevention resources when you don't know if they're good or even safe. A safety concern that may or may not be specific to the US; many crisis lines have a policy of not calling for medical help without the caller's permission. I don't believe this is problematic. A call for emergency medical help risks bringing the police, who will kick in your door and shoot your dog while you are hiding under the bed having an anxiety attack. It has an even higher risk of bringing a very expensive ambulance.

Some of the warnings about increases in suicide are sincere, I think. Misinformed, but sincere. There was an article in the Washington Post in January about how a few small towns had a drastic increase in the suicide rate, in terms of percentage. On the order of 12 people in 2019 and 16 in 2020. Extrapolating from that percentage is terrifying...but it's 4 people. Statewide, it would be hard to notice, even if the rate in the big cities hadn't decreased a smidge to balance it out.

[landofnowhere]

I agree with all of this!

A minor statistical note on the last paragraph: I haven't read the WaPo article, but I'd expect that every year there are a few small towns like that, just because there are a lot of small towns, and random chance happens, plus suicides tend to cluster. And the towns that had more suicides in 2019 than 2020 aren't news anymore. Which doesn't mean it isn't awful living in the towns that just had a suicide spike on top of everything else.

[flippac]

It's worth noting that the Samaritans' policy about intervention is not just about want but need: otherwise some things can't be said at all lest an escalation make somebody's situation worse and ultimately induce instead of prevent.

The confidentiality failures should be viewed in that light.

[ayebydan]

*applauds*

[lilacsigil]

The suicide rate seems (so far) to have gone *down* slightly here in Australia, despite predictions. And a good part of that is that the unemployment benefit has been greatly raised (though it's due to plummet back to well below the poverty level at the end of March this year). People have been able to afford medical help, which is generally cheap but not free.

[superborb]

Oh, so much yes! I generally dislike chain letters (as most people do, I suspect), but when it's something like this that could so easily cause harm, it slides into hate.

[switterbeet]

Thank you for this - well articulated and interesting. I appreciate the CBC post because, well, I'm in Canada. The mechanisms they list also make sense (come together effect, etc).

I've seen people using suicide / mental health as a reason to reduce COVID-19 restrictions and it's ... hard to argue with something that emotionally charged.

I'm sure there will be studies for decades on all the sociological effects coming out of the pandemic.

[silveradept]

Thank you for the information and the caution about reposting things that are intended to be harmful rather than helpful.