More and more is being done on social networking platforms in regards to suicide prevention.  Keep updated on our Facebook page and join the conversation!

A great article by Boston Globe Correspondent Karen Weintraub talking about how the Military is monitoring social media to cut the suicide rate.

"Nearly every day, an active-duty service member takes his or her own life, causing waves of grief among families and peers.  And each day, on average, 22 military veterans in the United States commit suicide.  Roughly one in five Americans who commit suicide is or was in the service.  The military has been working aggressively since 2007 to try to stem suicides, but everyone agrees there will be no easy fix.

Now, however, big-data specialists, including the Newton software firm Attivio Inc., are collaborating with military suicide experts to try to address the problem by using social media to monitor veterans for signs of despondency.

The specialists said they are identifying key words and phrases that suggest someone is spiraling downward, while developing an analytics system that could examine thousands of online posts and alert medical specialists and family members when a veteran’s comments indicate he or she is at risk of committing suicide.

Relatively few people come out and say they are suicidal. But by tracking the postings of veterans who agree to participate in the system, organizers hope eventually to identify those at high risk, and to intervene early enough to make a difference.

The program, called the Durkheim Project after the man known as the father of sociology, Emile Durkheim, is developing algorithms to determine which phrases or combination of phrases are most predictive of suicide attempts.

“It’s the words they are using that’s the reliable signal,” said Chris Poulin, the director and principal investigator of the Durkheim Project and a predictive-analytics expert.

Although Poulin would not reveal the precise phrases the Durkheim Project has identified, suicide researcher Craig Bryan, a University of Utah psychologist who is advising the project, said that the coded language of the suicidal often includes phrases such as “You’d be better off without me,” “I messed everything up,” and “I can never be forgiven for my mistakes.”

Moreover, behaviors such as buying a gun or giving away belongings can help to identify at-risk veterans and are often reported on social media, Bryan said.

In the first phase of the project, which was just completed, Poulin and colleagues developed a language-driven predictive model to estimate suicide risk.

They based their research on doctors’ notes from the records of three groups of veterans: those who had committed suicide, those who had psychiatric challenges but were not suicidal, and those with no apparent psychiatric issues.

From the doctors’ notes, Poulin said, it was possible to distinguish between the three groups.

Those whose psychiatric problems were not life-threatening tended to talk about their eyesight, for example, or their preoccupations and personal hygiene. Those who were healthy talked to their doctors about muscle or joint pain or eating disorders. And the suicidal discussed their agitation and fears, along with their need for painkillers.

In the next phase of the Durkheim Project, Poulin and others will test the predictive quality of those insights among as many as 100,000 service members and veterans who agree to have their social media and mobile posts shared.

This kind of varied language, as well as the shorthand used on social media, can be extremely challenging to analyze, said Sid Probstein, the chief technology officer for Attivio, which is responsible for that analysis.

How those phrases change over time can also be a warning sign, Probstein said, so a huge amount of data has to be gathered from text messages, Twitter, Facebook, and other social media outlets and analyzed.

This kind of analysis of so-called “natural language” has been possible only recently, Probstein said, “so it’s really only in the last decade that you could imagine doing something like the Durkheim Project.”

Facebook, which helped debug the program, will assist in recruiting volunteers, Poulin said. The military provided a two-year start-up grant for the research.

Eventually, those whom the project identifies as at-risk will be automatically linked to resources in their area to get help, and their support network will be notified.

Users will be able to opt in and out of the system, so their privacy will not be compromised by the data analysis without their knowledge, said Poulin, who also worked with former colleagues at the Geisel School of Medicine at Dartmouth College.

“You don’t just get the person to opt in, but you get their friends and family to opt in, and let family know this person is suffering,” Poulin said.

If they do not have such support in their lives, there are scripts that can be read to at-risk people that have been shown to help, he said.

Even people who feel alone will leave a footprint on Facebook or via a text, Poulin said. “Their social network may be very small, but not so small that they don’t use a phone,” said Poulin.

Bryan, associate director of the National Center for Veterans’ Studies at the University of Utah, said the pressures on the military have increased exponentially over the past decade, as wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have dragged on and downsizing has meant service members doing more with less, increasing their stress and suicide risk, both during their service and after retirement.

Multiple deployments also take their toll on service members, who may be away from home for most of six or seven straight years, said Kelly Posner, director of the Center for Suicide Risk Assessments at Columbia University.

In combat, service members are distracted by the urgency of their tasks. Now that the wars are winding down and they are back home for good, “they’re having to face what they saw, what they did, what they didn’t do, their unmet mental health risks, their families that have not been together,” she said.

Suicide, she said, is the fourth-leading cause of death for those ages 18 to 64, and probably the most preventable, “but we need to keep working hard.”

By using observable behavior, the Durkheim Project may help the invisible become visible, Bryan said.

“That is really one of the missing links in suicide prevention, both inside and outside military.”"

If you haven't taken the time to follow @YouCanEndure on Twitter, do so now! We'll soon be doing social media outreach from the account and a Twitter "hotline" where you can ask questions.  As we hear more and more stories on the links between cyberbullying and suicides, expect people to be looking for answers.

Below are some cyberbullying statistics you should be aware of:
 
* 95% of social media-using teens who have witnessed cruel behavior on social networking sites say they have seen others ignoring the mean behavior; 55% witness this frequently. (Pew Internet Research Center, FOSI, Cable in the Classroom, 2011)

* 84% have seen the people defend the person being harassed; 27% report seeing this frequently.

* 84% have seen the people tell cyberbullies to stop bullying; 20% report seeing this frequently.

* 66% of teens who have witnessed online cruelty have also witnessed others joining; 21% say they have also joined in the harassment. (Pew Internet Research Center, FOSI, Cable in the Classroom, 2011)

* 90% of social media-using teens who have witnessed online cruelty say they have ignored mean behavior on social media; 35% have done this frequently. (Pew Internet Research Center, FOSI, Cable in the Classroom, 2011)

* 80% say they have defended the victim; 25% have done so frequently

* 79% have told the cyberbully to stop being mean and cruel; 20% have done so frequently

* Only 7% of U.S. parents are worried about cyberbullying, even though 33% of teenagers have been victims of
cyberbullying (Pew Internet and American Life Survey, 2011)

* 85% of parent of youth ages 13-17 report their child has a social networking account. (American Osteopathic Association, 2011)

* 52% of parents are worried their child will be bullied via social networking sites. (American Osteopathic Association, 2011)

* 1 in 6 parents know their child has been bullied via a social networking site. (American steopathic Association, 2011)

* One million children were harassed, threatend or subjected to other forms of cyberbullying on Facebook during the past year. (Consumer Reports, 2011)

* 43% of teens aged 13 to 17 report that they have experienced some sort of cyberbulying in the past year.[1]

* More girls are cyberbullys than boys (59% girls and 41% boys).[2]

* Cyberbullies spend more time online than other teens overall (38.4 hours compared to 26.8 hours).[3]

* Cyberbullies are more likely to have engaged in sexting (31% vs. 19% for teens overall).[4]

* 34% of those who have had any engagement in cyberbullying have been both a cyberbully and been cyberbullied.[5]

* 68% of teens agree that cyberbullying is a serious problem with today’s youth.[6]Reasons cyberbullies said they engaged in cyberbullying:[7]
To show off to friends (11%)
To be mean (14%)
Something else (16%)
To embarrass them (21%)
For fun or entertainment (28%)
They deserved it (58%)
To get back at someone (58%)

* 81% of youth agree that bullying online is easier to get away with than bullying in person.[8]

* 80% think it is easier to hide online bullying from parents than in-person bullying.[9]
  
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[1] Harris Interactive Trends & Tudes, 2007.
 
[2] Teen Online & Wireless Safety Survey: Cyberbullying, Sexting and Parental Controls.  Cox Communications Teen Online and Wireless Safety Survey in Partnership with the National Center for Missing and Exploited
Children, 2009.
 
[3] Teen Online & Wireless Safety Survey: Cyberbullying, Sexting and Parental Controls.  Cox Communications Teen Online and Wireless Safety Survey in Partnership with the National Center for Missing and Exploited
Children, 2009.
 
[4] Teen Online & Wireless Safety Survey: Cyberbullying, Sexting and Parental Controls.  Cox Communications Teen Online and Wireless Safety Survey in Partnership with the National Center for Missing and Exploited
Children, 2009.
 
[5] Teen Online & Wireless Safety Survey: Cyberbullying, Sexting and Parental Controls.  Cox Communications Teen Online and Wireless Safety Survey in Partnership with the National Center for Missing and Exploited
Children, 2009.
 
[6] Teen Online & Wireless Safety Survey: Cyberbullying, Sexting and Parental Controls.  Cox Communications Teen Online and Wireless Safety Survey in Partnership with the National Center for Missing and Exploited
Children, 2009.
 
[7] Teen Online & Wireless Safety Survey: Cyberbullying, Sexting and Parental Controls.  Cox Communications Teen Online and Wireless Safety Survey in Partnership with the National Center for Missing and Exploited
Children, 2009.
 
[8] Teen Online & Wireless Safety Survey: Cyberbullying, Sexting and Parental Controls.  Cox Communications Teen Online and Wireless Safety Survey in Partnership with the National Center for Missing and Exploited
Children, 2009.
 
[9] Teen Online & Wireless Safety Survey: Cyberbullying, Sexting and Parental Controls.  Cox Communications Teen Online and Wireless Safety Survey in Partnership with the National Center for Missing and Exploited
Children, 2009.