Hurdles abound in saving a life
In era of Facebook, Canada lags in helping suicidal people abroad
When Paige Dayal decided that posting a message on a teen’s Tumblr page urging him not to kill himself wasn’t good enough, she and her mother placed a call to local police in Newmarket.
The problem? The despondent teen who wrote he’d been swallowing pills in the hope of overdosing lived in a small town in England, an entire Atlantic Ocean away.
Police here said there was nothing they could do, and suggested calling the RCMP.
They called. But the national police service said they couldn’t help, either. “The person then wished us luck, which I found shocking,” Paige’s mom, Laura Stevenson, told the Star’s Rosie Dimanno last week.
Hundreds of people from all over the world, as well as those who attended the same school as the youth, posted messages of concern on his page. (Along with that came vicious mail goading him to do it.)
But it was 14-year-old Paige who called for help, eventually getting hold of a central police station in Bath, west of London. Soon after, an officer knocked on the youth’s door.
Paige’s actions as well as the inaction of law enforcement in Canada and individuals abroad raise an overarching question: Whose responsibility is it to act when another’s life could be in danger?
Waterloo’s Ellen Ibele has had that query on her mind ever since she and her teenage daughter, Kitty, found themselves in a strikingly similar situation last year.
Kitty, then 17, had been chatting online with a Facebook friend in the U.K. when he told her he was plan-
“We all need to take some responsibility for people all around the world.”
ELLEN IBELE, WHO SAVED A SUICIDAL TEEN ON FACEBOOK LAST YEAR
ning to throw himself in front of a car on the highway, and then promptly signed off.
The mother and daughter duo — just like Paige and her mom — called Waterloo region police who, just like Newmarket’s, said they couldn’t help and forwarded them on to the RCMP.
It wasn’t that they didn’t want to help, Ibele said of the RCMP’S response, but that they “didn’t know who to call,” suggesting she try a phone operator in England. That didn’t help because they didn’t have the name of the teen’s city. .
“Really, I thought police forces were much more interconnected,” Ibele said Monday, adding she often sees news reports of law enforce- ment worldwide working together to bust child porn rings. Why not the same cooperation when it comes to possible suicide attempts? She assumed they would have the technology to track down an internet address at the ready, honing in on where a post was coming from. And reading Paige’s story over the weekend made her wonder: How often do such scenarios occur? The RCMP did not return a request for comment Monday. In the end, Kitty — playing amateur sleuth just like Paige — contacted the teen’s friends through Facebook. They reached family, organizing a search and eventually finding the young man lying in the middle of a road. He was safe. But the result could have been tragic. “In both cases a life could have been lost,” said Ibele. Tim Wall, executive director of the Canadian Association of Suicide Prevention, thinks “we’re still lagging a bit behind” when it comes to responding to potentially suicidal individuals outside the country. Technology is churning up scenarios that didn’t exist just a few years ago. “We have some catch-up to do,” Wall added. And not just there. Canada remains the only G8 country without a national suicide prevention strategy. And there is no agency to assist people who find themselves in situations similar to teens like Paige and Kitty, said Wall. A nationally funded suicide pre- vention body, like those in Scotland and Ireland, could be charged with the task of working with the RCMP and other law enforcement agencies to develop such procedures.
Last month, Bill C300, a private member’s bill calling for a national suicide prevention framework, passed its second reading in the House of Commons.
While that ought to be lauded, the bill ultimately can’t address the issue of funding, limiting the effectiveness of any strategy, said Wall.
Experts here agree. We can, and must, do more.
In the U.S., the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline recently launched an innovative initiative whereby Facebook users can report possibly suicidal users.
Those posts are then vetted by a Facebook staffer and if deemed serious, forwarded on to the hotline. If they come from Canada, centres in the U.S. can refer people to hotlines in Canada.
In the meantime, if anyone finds themselves faced with a cry for help coming from halfway across the world, Wall suggested reaching out to suicide hotlines abroad, too.
For Ellen Ibele, not helping the young man across the pond would have been akin to standing in front of a car wreck and doing nothing. That’s why she picked up the phone.
“We all need to take some responsibility for people all around the world,” she said.
She would, however, like to see more recognition from law enforcement that their jurisdictions, too, are becoming wider.