Suicide prevention gets online lifeline
Suicide prevention efforts are changing in the digital age.
Social media websites such as Facebook and Instagram have added tools to their websites allowing users to flag friends’ posts as alarming.
Clinicians can use social media to keep track of their patients between office visits.
Researchers can conduct studies with public data from social media.
Jill Harkavy- Friedman, vice president of research at the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention, said she has seen an increased interest in social media research in the last few years.
Suicide prevention researchers apply for funding from the foundation, she said, and lately some have proposed studies on topics ranging from using media to spot potential cases to better understanding what warning signs look like online.
But researchers and clinicians are still figuring out social media. Dr. April Foreman, suicide prevention coordinator for the Southeast Louisiana Veterans Health Care System, said traditional suicide prevention research methods don’t work because changes happen too fast on social media. By the time experts can publish, their work is outdated.
Hoping to solve this, Foreman co- founded # SPSM ( Suicide Prevention and Social Media), an online community for suicide and crisis prevention experts. The group is
on a summer hiatus, but for several years, every Sunday night, Foreman has gathered experts in a moderated Twitter chat.
On # SPSM, data scientists, clinicians, law enforcement officers, primary care doctors and suicide attempt survivors can communicate. “We try to get them all talking so we can spread expertise as quickly as it develops,” Foreman said.
One of the clinicians on # SPSM is Dr. Craig Bryan, executive director of the National Center for Veterans Studies and assistant professor of psychology at the University of Utah. He has a number of studies underway on the relationship between social media and suicide prevention.
“When people are posting online — just what they’re thinking and feeling or doing — you’re getting a snapshot into their internal mental state,” he said. “We can potentially understand how people are thinking and feeling in a way that wasn’t possible before.”
For one study, his team partnered with the Department of Defense. Using publicly available content from Twitter and Facebook, they analyzed the posts of veterans who killed themselves.
“Did they talk in different ways? Did they post different types of pictures? Did they behave in different ways on these sites?” Bryan said. “The preliminary results say that, yes, you can distinguish them.”
Bryan hopes his center’s research will identify early signals and make it possible to use social media to connect people with help.
Another contributor to # SPSM is Glen Coppersmith, founder and chief executive officer of Qntfy ( pronounced “quantify”), a group that aims to provide mental health professionals with insight beyond what they can get from a standard appointment.
Coppersmith is a data scientist with a background in computer science and psychology. His team at Qntfy is working on a project that keeps track of specific patients’ social media activity. They’re still in the development phase, but they have clinical trials planned for the end of the year.
“What you really care about with mental health is how a person is integrating with society,” he said. “So the whole idea is to take lots of data and make it useful to empower the clinician, so they are better informed.”
Keeping clinicians informed is important, he said, because they are the ones who decide which treatments to use. But there’s too much data on social media for them to sift through.
Coppersmith’s team can gather data from a person’s social media activity and distill it into a small amount of relevant data, he said. After reducing the data, the team develops plots that show how
a patient is doing over time.
“We’ve spent a lot of time building out the analytics on the back end,” he said. “What quantifiable signs in social media are relevant, and how can we use them to inform clinical practice?”
The patients also track workouts and meals. Then they give Coppersmith’s team access to that information. With everything together, Coppersmith said, his team can piece together a picture of the patient’s life.
“We can say, ‘ Gee, it looks like an average day for your step count. You did a workout today, which you do every Friday. You had a beer, which you don’t do every Friday, so we’ll keep an eye on that. If your social media account says something about being lonely, that’s OK because everyone gets lonely,’” he said.
Small signals may not be alarming on their own, so using computers to keep an eye on things can open up a lot of possibilities in mental health, he said.