Our very scary news report of the day comes from the Guardian, reporting on the UK Government’s proposed action against “suicide websites and chatrooms”. Basically depressed and/or suicidal people get together, chat about it a bit (presumably while listening to the Smiths or some early Nick Cave), and then forge a pact to die together. Because not even a depressed Goth wants to die alone.
The degree to which the Home Office now have their knickers in a knot would seem to indicate that tens of thousands of teens are marching lemming-like (an urban legend, I know) into the sea, but apparently “the move comes after two strangers forged Britain’s first internet suicide pact”.
The seriously scary quote can be found a few paragraphs down:
Talks are taking place with a number of service providers, including Yahoo! and AOL, and search engine companies, in an attempt to reprioritise the results that are thrown up during a trawl on the internet. “When somebody keys in ‘suicide’ and ‘UK’, we would like them to be offered a link to the Samaritans long before they find a website showing them what they can do with a car exhaust and a hosepipe,” one official said.
Leaving aside the tender issue of whether the authorities have a right to stop informed adults committing suicide, let’s look at how they’re approaching a problem of social isolation among the general populace. Basically, they’re hoping that if scared and confused people contemplating suicide cannot find a handy how-to on Google, these people won’t be able to come up with any innovative ideas themselves.
Rather than increase spending on social programmes and mental health infrastructure, addressing the most likely root of the problem, the UK Government chooses to send a squad of presumably non-technical bureaucrats to bully private companies into manipulating the information Internet users see.
Schemes this hairbrained are most often backed by well-meaning parents, and this one is no different. The Guardian reports on a group named ”[...] Papyrus, a charity set up by bereaved British parents to reduce suicide among young people. Papyrus points to a number of cases in the UK in which suicide notes have revealed clearly ‘the pivotal role’ of information from the internet.”
Now, if we were to stack a pile of pennies for every teen suicide where the Internet played a “pivotal role”, and we were to stack a pile of pennies for every teen suicide where emotionally absent and manipulative parents played a “pivotal role”, which pile of pennies would most likely be the bigger pile? Strange thing, I doubt we’d have much of a pile on the Internet side.
You can argue the issue as much as you like, but Mike Altman still said it best:
A brave man once requested me
to answer questions that are key
is it to be or not to be
and I replied ‘oh why ask me?’
‘Cause suicide is painless
it brings on many changes
and I can take or leave it if I please.
...and you can do the same thing if you please.
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