Social Media can Serve as Early Warning System to Curb Suicide Rates

University researchers claim that social media can become an early warning system to help prevent tragedies like suicide.

In this new study, researchers at Brigham Young University examined several tweets from 50 different states over a three month period. After navigating through millions of tweets their algorithms picked tweets that had direct discussion of suicide and also those tweets that included keywords and phrases linked with known risk factors such as bullying and depression.

"With social media, kids sometimes say things that they aren't saying out loud to an adult or friend in person," Christopher Giraud-Carrier, a BYU computer scientist and one of the study's seven authors, said in a press statement.

After sifting through millions of tweets they found 37,717 genuinely disturbing tweets from 28,088 unique users for whom some location information was available. They found that the ratio of suicidal tweets for each state strongly correlated with the actual suicide rate.

The nation with the highest suicide rate was Alaska and the researchers spotted 61 twitter users as at risk individuals. Slightly lower suicide rate was seen in Texas but the population of twitter users listed as at risk cases was high with 3,000 users. Nearly 195 twitter users were at risk in Utah.

"Tweets may be useful to address some of the functions that suicide hotline groups perform, but at the discretion and potential for such organizations to provide those services via Twitter," Michael Barnes, a health science professor at BYU and a study co-author, said in a press statement.

Prior to this, researchers found that nearly 15 percent of the tweets contained at least state level location, this can help in involving state health care departments.

Next, the researchers plan to develop an app for school students that will incorporate as well as analyze data that students post. The app's algorithm will notify the counselors the moment a student posts something disturbing that is a cry for help.

Carl Hanson, a BYU health scientist and study co-author concluded saying, "Suicide is preventable. Social media is one channel for monitoring those at risk for suicide and potentially doing something about it."

This finding may help prevent cases like the recent one of Rebecca Ann Sedwick where relentless bullying online and offline led to her suicide.

This study was published in the journal Crisis.