My teenage son Googled ‘How do I kill myself ?’ And it told him
A GRIEVING mother whose 15-year-old son hanged himself after viewing an internet suicide tutorial has backed calls for a crackdown on self-harm details online.
Emma Oliver, 44, hit out at the ease with which troubled youngsters could access information following the death of her A-grade student son Daniel.
He had used Google to search for ways to end his life, she said.
Ms Oliver spoke out as former health minister and Liberal Democrat MP Norman Lamb called for an independent regulator “with teeth” to protect children from harm.
Writing in this paper, Mr Lamb, chairman of the Science and Technology Committee which reported last week that social media companies should have a “legal duty of care” to children, said: “Self-regulation is not working.”
The call comes as suicide prevention charity Papyrus revealed 40 parents claimed explicit online material on suicide or self-harm had played a significant part in the suicide of their child.
Its figures also show 200 children of school age take their own lives every year.
Ms Oliver, who has a daughter, Chelsea, 24, had been cooking a Sunday roast on February 26, 2017, when she went up to her son’s room and discovered him hanging and near death.
An inquest heard that he had been stressed over his GCSEs and panicking he would forget everything.
That morning Daniel, whose ambition was to become a barrister or politician, had seemed restless, walking up and down the stairs as she cooked.
When she heard a loud bang she raced upstairs to find Daniel.
She cut him down, gave him CPR and managed to get a heartbeat, but he died in hospital two days later.
Ms Oliver, an office administrator from Gildersome, near Leeds, THE number of teenage suicides in England and Wales rose by 67 per cent between 2010 and 2017.
In the last year alone 187 under-19s took their own lives, compared with 162 the year before – a rise of 15 per cent – figures from the Office for National Statistics show.
At the start of the decade, in 2010, the figure stood at 112 teenage suicides.
Meanwhile, hospitals are treating almost twice as many girls for self-harm as they did 20 years ago, prompting warnings about the pressures that social media and school work are putting on young people.
The number of hospital admissions for girls who self-harmed jumped from 7,327 in 1997 to 13,463 last year. The number treated for attempting an overdose rose more than tenfold, from 249 in 1997 to 2,736 in 2017, according to NHS data.
Admissions of self-harming boys stayed broadly constant, from 2,236 in
1997 to 2,332 in 2017. The number attempting an overdose jumped from 152 in 1997 to 839 in 2017.
The NSPCC counsels around 15,000 children about self-harm a year, carrying out an average of 40 sessions per day. now runs a support group for parents worried about their children and suicide.
She said: “Daniel had Googled how to kill himself. I was cooking a Sunday roast downstairs when he put the knot on his neck.
“When I found him I immediately realised he must have looked up how to do it. I knew he hadn’t previously known how to tie that knot. “Police took his phone which confirmed he had been researching ways of killing yourself. “How does that information get out there? There needs to be control – this information needs to be removed. If they allow it on then they’ll get it off these sites. And it doesn’t
work to report things to these tech giants. I’ve reported things that are disturbing but it never gets removed. The system isn’t working and I’m angry it is allowed to continue.”
Ms Oliver added: “Two years ago I didn’t have a care in the world.
“Imagine someone taking your heart out and stamping on it a million times. That’s what it’s like. I don’t plan for the future anymore because I don’t see the point now.
“I have parents calling worried for their children. I have GPs calling saying there isn’t enough support for them and I have students telling me they’re worried about their exams and they feel that there is no one to turn to. Personally, I don’t think anyone wants to take their own life really. It’s the situation they’re in that they want to end.
“I miss Daniel so much. All I do is sit every night researching mental health and children. It keeps me going and stops me doing the same thing as Daniel. I used to be scared of dying. I am not anymore.
“I don’t want Daniel to become just another statistic. His legacy has to stop another child going down the same route.”
Ms Oliver has since launched a campaign for all secondary schools to have on-site, fulltime properly trained counsellors, with the