Suicide Threats

How do you deal with suicide threats on your site? What about actual deaths of your members? Announce the death? Post the obituary?

If somebody were to threaten suicide on your forum and you tried to talk them out of it or have them confide in you, and they end up following through, then you could be liable. Even sued.

So it's important that suicide threats are handled properly. I'd like to hear what your policy and plan of action is for your moderators and how to have your staff handle such a situation. I'm not really sure what exactly I should do in this case, so I'm curious to learn.

 

I have the numbers for the National (U.S.) Suicide Hotlines posted in the Admin forum:

1-800-SUICIDE (1-800-784-2433)
1-800-273-TALK (1-800-273-8255)
TTY: 1-800-799-4TTY (1-800-799-4889)

And if I know the location of a member I think might be suicidal, I'll look up any local hotlines or counseling centers, or at least try to get a Googleable name of a friend or relative out of them.

 

So you give them those telephone numbers, or you call yourself? And what do you do with their thread or post? Leave it? Hide it?

And how do you respond to the user? Do you just ignore them?

 

=\ Hmm... Prettty hard to do...

I must say I would never know till I get there.....


EDIT: Saw Michelle's post, that's a GOOD idea.

 

I post the numbers above and lock the threads. May seem harsh but someone really set on suicide is going to perform the act. They are not going to post on forums. Those who post on websites about them committing suicide are looking for attention. If they want to get counseling and are depressed, they need to contact someone that is trained to deal with it. I have never run a forum with trained clinical therapists online 24 hours a day and I doubt most people here have this.

Does your site really need this kind of publicity:
Black teen's suicide highlights mental illness - The Daily Voice - Black America's Daily News Source

 

Tell them to call someone that was named above and if they don't call you should because that's kind of serious and scary so have them call or you do it yourself just in case that person decides to go through with it. save the post for later in case you need them put them in a safe place and don't edit them.

 

So far any incidents have happened in the chat room, but if it was in a thread I'd send them the hotline numbers and move the thread to the admin section. My team has instructions to call me immediately, no matter the hour, because I would rather that myself.

In my experience, it's the ones who never say anything who are most likely to go through with it. Trust your instincts and ask people what they're thinking.

 

I will use these numbers a lot.... I JUST recieved something like this from a member, thank you Michelle.

 

We ban the member.

For there safety and ours. Seems harsh, but were not trained to handle it. So why should we?

 

Unless you collect their address and phone number and keep it up to date, calling yourself is a waste of time. It will take days to get a court order for geotagging the IP address and getting a location. If they are serious, the deed is done. All you can do is encourage them to contact people who can deal with the underlying issues. Those people include friends, family, priests, guidance counselors and trained therapists.

And this is coming from someone whose parents used to run a local suicide hotline called NEAR. Of course my father was a Deputy Probation Officer for Los Angeles County and had a bachelors degree in Clinical Psychology. My mother at the time spent time as a teacher in a youth offender camp and as a guidance counselor.

 

Never had (or even seen) one.

 

You can often look up the geolocation of the IP address, but that often isn't really accurate, plus without a real name and address you'd really have a hard time getting them help.

 

For two years, the Geolocation of my IP address was West Virginia where the main offices of Time Warner Cable are located. I am in Southern California and have never lived in West Virginia. Now it just says - UNITED STATES, CALIFORNIA, LANCASTER. There are 170,000 people in the city of Lancaster and the local Time Warner Cable office services a region of over 400,000 people.

 

We had a person on Yahoo Answers starting to give us the Murder/suicide vibe in a big way. I'm used to people asking about how effective something is for home defense but this person's questions was over the top. We finally started posted the hot line numbers instead of answering questions. They claimed there was no intention of suicides which just made me think of the other possibility. I honestly didn't know what to say out side of the hot line numbers. It could have been a prank which we get a lot but I didn't know. So I avoided them after that.

 

Exactly; it might tell you the general location of the person's ISP, but that could be completely inaccurate.

 

I have seen this myself too, the results are normally way off putting people in nearby cities. We would provide hotlines and as much advice as we can but make it clear that we are not professionals and they should seek professional help immediately.