“DEPRESSION SIGNS SIMILAR TO SOME BLUE WHALE TASKS”

Recently the mother of a 16-year-old boy, who was found hanging from a ceiling fan at his residence in July, claimed that the suicide was due to the Blue Whale game. “He told me he came across the game (the Blue Whale Challenge) last November and we tried our best to dissuade him. He developed a strange behaviour… used to go and sit in graveyards at night...,” his mother was reported as saying.

Following this, the mother of a 22-yearold Industrial Training Institute student, who allegedly hanged himself in his house last month, also said that they feared he had been playing the game. “He had earlier slashed his arms with a blade and the family had thought the act was due to depression. He was taken for counselling but remained gloomy and aloof,” said the mother. “We had no idea about the game. But when we saw another mother describing about her son’s death on TV we found a lot of similarities between them,” she was quoted as saying.

However, Manoj Abraham of Kerala Police said, “There can be two kinds of depression – sudden or long term. A person with depression often behaves in the same way that the alleged players of the game do – there is a tendency of self-harm, roaming around at night etc. When parents heard of the game, they could associate their sons’ behaviour with it and said they were playing Blue Whale. But we haven’t found any links to the game yet.”