Wilson started a Facebook group for people who have also lost family members to suicide who were part of the Suicide Solution community. She, along with another active mother in the group, Jackie Bieber, are pushing for legislation—Bieber to increase the punishment for those who assist others in suicide and Wilson, to increase the liability website servers have for the content on the sites they host.Wilson and Bieber have a unified overarching goal: They want Suicide Solution shut down. They both said that they are certain their children would still be alive if they had never found it. “You’re never going to get help in a place like that,” Wilson said. “This is going to haunt me for the rest of my life.”In 2017, more than 47,000 people in the U.S. died by suicide, an increase of 33 percent since 1999. Suicide is currently the 10th leading cause of death. Evidence suggests that when a vulnerable person is exposed to suicide in their in-person social networks, it increases their risk of suicide, a theory known as suicide contagion. Writing about suicide, as a member of the media, also comes with risk. Some studies have suggested that mentioning details in news articles or glorifying suicide in TV shows or movies can increase suicidal thoughts in at-risk people.If you or someone you know is in crisis, call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 800-273-8255, text TALK to 741741, or visit https://suicidepreventionlifeline.org for more information.
Yet, despite the internet's undeniably central role in how people learn, talk about, and connect over suicidality, we're still lacking basic information about the everyday influence of the internet on suicide vulnerability. We don’t know enough about what people look for online and why. We don't know whether what they find—on purpose or accidentally—can impact their decision-making in meaningful ways, or if it simply reinforces decisions that were made beforehand. We know that having access to guns, or other lethal means by which to die, dramatically increases suicide risk. But we can't yet quantify the exact risk of having access to information about methods online. Suppressing suicide discussions online can be a gargantuan and impossible-seeming task. People are likely never going to stop talking about suicide online, whether it's dangerous or not. A review of hundreds of posts on Suicide Solution makes clear that people end up on the site because they feel overly censored in other forums. Too much censorship around talking about suicide ideation can end up making people feel ashamed of their thoughts, isolated, and even more hopeless. In this regard, Suicide Solution can be viewed not only as a contributing cause to people’s deaths, but also an effect of a society that isn’t meeting the needs of suicidal people.We know that having access to guns, or other lethal means by which to die, dramatically increases suicide risk. But we can't yet quantify the exact risk of having access to information about methods online.
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Wilson tried to make home a fun and stimulating environment. She bought board games. She played relaxing music. She planned activities that got them out of the house in any way possible. But Junior’s obsessive streak—which led to hours of practice with Speed Stacks or binging the Weather Channel—could take a dark turn. Junior would spend hours googling to see whether there was something wrong with him: an illness, a brain tumor, an undiagnosed disease.
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It makes the whole subject incredibly fraught and dangerous, with vulnerable lives on the line. But hand-wringing, moderation, and fear can also foster the creation of communities like Suicide Solution, where people comment on how moderated and stifled they feel on other forums, unable to fully express what they're really thinking. Quelling all discussions of suicide, leaving people to process complex and stigmatized feelings alone, doesn’t help either. Feeling supported and as if you're not a burden to others is a critical piece of suicide prevention.
If she were doing prevention work in this space, Mueller said, she would want to focus on the factors that brought people to the site. “I’m definitely not arguing that this website is like a good thing at all and would definitely argue the opposite,” Mueller said. But she thinks there are interesting scientific questions here: How powerful is participation in a website like this? Why do people participate?April Foreman, a psychologist on the executive board of the American Association of Suicidology, said that we have almost no scientific evidence on how people who experience suicidal pain talk in ways that help each other or hurt each other online. “There's a lot of fearfulness, a lot of moral panic around it,” she said. “There are, of course, real losses like these families who've lost folks.”“The rabbit hole goes deep. Folks are going to create spaces to talk about suicide the way they want to.”
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In a thread about how people found their way to Suicide Solution, one person wrote that, “I was sold when I found that this site allowed open discussion about suicide (none of the platitudes, guilt-tripping, pro-life rhetoric and bullshit), and did not censor people from talking about suicide and death. Furthermore, the main reason I came was the open discussion about methods. To this day, I do not know of many other forums that are as active, easy to use, and supportive as this one and allows discussion about suicide methods.” In 2020, a user wrote, “I've received more genuine support and empathy in this forum than anywhere else ever in my life. No doctor, psychiatrist or therapist could ever come close to this kind of honest and sincere support.”“There’s something that’s pulling people towards this,” Tracy Witte said,the professor of psychology at Auburn University. “Right now it seems like the choices appear only to be complete censorship or letting it be a free for all. Maybe there’s something in-between. I don’t know the answer to that.”
Anna Borges, a journalist who wrote a viral piece about suicidal ideation in The Outline in 2019, wrote in her newsletter on suicidality that not being able to talk about her suicidal thoughts makes living with them harder. “The weightiness of the confession, the impossibility of explaining that it both is and isn’t as serious as it sounds,” Borges wrote. “I don’t always want to be alive. Yes, I mean it. No, you shouldn’t be afraid for me. No, I’m not in danger of killing myself right now. Yes, I really mean it.”She wrote about her worry about what people would think and do if she was honest about her thoughts. “But then I think: Isn’t there middle ground between hypervigilance and complete secrecy?" she wrote. "What if we acknowledged the possibility of suicidality all around us, normalized asking and checking in? If people talked about feeling suicidal — not joked, as we’ve all started to do online, but really talked — as much as they talked about feeling depressed or anxious, would we finally be forced to see how common it is and start creating space for these conversations? Would it be the worst thing in the world if we started talking about not wanting to be alive, and what might help keep us here?”I thought about this passage as I wrestled with how to write about a site like Suicide Solution. Even publishing an article at this length, that includes details of what makes the site dangerous, is a controversial choice. Suicide survivors and researchers alike cautioned against publishing the site's real name. At least one expert I spoke to was hesitant to be interviewed at all because of the fear that they would contribute to driving more people to the site. And, in fact, it might. In one thread I read on Suicide Solution about how people found the website, several users referenced a past VICE article from 2015. Our choice to not to use Suicide Solution's real name is a reflection of the uncertainty that plagues this arena— about how the internet confers risk, how the ease of finding the site contributes to that risk, and the variability in how people will use the forum. Still, Foreman said that it makes sense to think that if we just control all the information online about suicide, then people won’t die by suicide anymore. But Suicide Solution's many incarnations throughout the decades are enough proof that a community like this one may never fully disappear. Trying too hard to stifle it could only drive it back to the Dark Web, out of sight. “Suicide was a leading cause of death for youth before the internet and before social media, before bulletin boards,” Foreman said. “It has gone up some, but it was a leading cause of death before all of those things because something else is going on. At the end of the day, you could get rid of that website. And I don't think that you would see an appreciable change at all in in suicide deaths.”Instead, she thinks the more critical question to ask is: What need is Suicide Solution meeting—even dangerously so—and how do we create systems and supports around the person so that they don't have to turn only to the internet to feel supported?People who have never experienced suicidal thoughts need to better understand the difference between ideation and action, giving people the space to express their thoughts without judgement, while providing resources and discouragement from taking action on those thoughts. Conflating suicidal thoughts with actions—when they don’t always go hand in hand—makes people feel like they can’t express what they’re thinking. It drives them to places like Suicide Solution, where anything goes. “I think knowing that not every suicidal thought is a crisis is important,” Stage said. "When I have someone come to see me and they say they’re suicidal, I still feel fearful. I feel like I might make a mistake, might say the wrong thing. I don’t think there’s a way to not feel fearful, honestly. But letting that drive our decisions is a problem.”Mueller encourages people, especially parents, to get training in suicide prevention. Living Works is one program she recommended; its participants practice how to talk about suicide with family or friends. Having a place to talk to others with lived experience can help people see that it’s possible to feel better. “It makes you realize you really can survive these things. And things change," said Cathy Barber, a senior researcher at the Harvard School of Public Health's Injury Research Center.It can be incredibly healing to have a place to talk about how flawed the mental health system is: How your first, third, or fifth therapist might not click; how a suicide hotline might just recite platitudes that don’t resonate with you; how going to an emergency room was an alienating and traumatizing experience; how it feels to be bullied, or depressed, or anxious."Suicide Solution is a community of people who are in horrible pain," Foreman said. "A bunch of people in horrible pain found each other and are doing some things that could increase all their risk of dying. Meanwhile, we've left them all the responsibility. We've decided to not invest in understanding and relieving their pain. If we did something about people's pain that was reliable, helped and had good science behind it, you wouldn’t need websites like that."On the morning of Junior's funeral service, Wilson lay motionless on her couch with a crushing sense of disbelief. "I was sitting there, trying to wrap my head around what was actually happening that day," she said "Like, 'Wow, I'm going to my son's funeral,' you know? I just want it to go away, the pain. And it won't." How does someone cope with losing a child, a friend, a cousin—like the members of Wilson's Facebook group—while grappling with their belonging to the Suicide Solution community? There are no good answers here either. The grief of loss survivors is a part of this story too: their trauma and the lingering questions they have about when, how, and where they might have intervened. So many have already been lost because of all that we don't know. "My son never gave me any problem," Wilson said. "He was a good kid." Wilson said she won't stop trying to shut down Suicide Solution. "We're not going to fix mental health overnight," she said. "It's not going to happen and there definitely needs to be changes. But there definitely doesn't need to be this."Along with the legislation she's working on, Bieber said she's also focused on advocacy, and telling Shawn's story. She wants mental health professionals to become more aware of what's happening online, and how young people are using the internet to talk about mental health. "When I was younger, I didn't have the internet access like that to information," Wilson agreed. "I'm not talking about just Suicide Solution, I'm talking about just anything in general. You have the whole world at your fingertips."When Bieber shared screenshots with other parents she knew, she said many of their kids were aware of the site already. "Us as parents, we had no idea that this is out here," Bieber said. "But our kids knew about it."What need is Suicide Solution meeting—even dangerously so—and how do we create systems and supports around the person so that they don't have to turn only to the internet to feel supported?
Follow Shayla Love on Twitter.If you or someone you know is in crisis, call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 800-273-8255, text TALK to 741741, or visit https://suicidepreventionlifeline.org for more information.