Monday night/Tuesday morning (depending on your time zone) there were a couple of people I know of who talked on Twitter about killing themselves. I'm not going to use any names here. If you think you know who I'm talking about you may be wrong. I only see the tweets of a couple of thousand people, there could easily have been more talking about the subject.
In the more than twenty years that I have been online, using a variety of services, I have known exactly one successful suicide. Call him "Xavier." It wasn't his name, or his nickname, or his online handle. "Xavier" had nothing to do with him, it's just a convenient way to refer to him.
Xavier didn't come into a chat room or a discussion forum and post that life sucked and he wanted to end it all. Oh, with 20/20 hindsight we were able to see a trail of breadcrumbs leading up to it. But we were ordinary folks, not psychological professionals. It didn't scream "Suicide warning!" at us. One night Xavier simply posted a chilling poem entitled "My Final Friend" on a message board in a poetry forum describing what he was going to do, then immediately went out and did it.
Xavier had already been dead at least a couple of hours before anyone who knew him read the post. That person thought Xavier was upset about something and wanted to see what was wrong. Nobody in chat had seen him that evening. Was the poem something to worry about? Not seeing him in chat was odd, but it was Saturday night, after all. Yes, the poem was dark and powerful, but he'd written powerful poetry before. We were still dithering when his ex-wife's roomie signed on and told us the police were there, and Xavier was dead.
Over the next few days we talked a lot about Xavier. We went back to the poetry forum message boards and reread all of his poems. Someone collected them and posted them consecutively as a memorial. Reading them all together, and talking about seemingly casual remarks he'd made in chat we reconstructed a trail that we thought should have told us what was happening. How the hell could we have been so blind? By the time we had beaten ourselves into emotional wrecks I'm sure we were seeing signs that weren't really there.
Fast forward maybe a month. I'm off in a far corner of the same online service reading message boards and explaining on those same boards why those who didn't agree with me were idiots. That system's equivalent of an Instant Message arrives. The conversation went something like this:
- Is El Cajon, CA anywhere near San Diego, CA?
- Maybe half an hour east of here, why?
- Get your ass up here to [chat room name]! We've got someone talking about killing herself and you're the only person in that area we know right now!
- On my way!
Call her "CryingBaby." Again, not her name, nor her nickname, nor the handle she used on line. Just a way to refer to her here. She was a Navy wife in her mid 20s. She was alone with her baby in a cheap apartment. Her husband was on an extended cruise and had never even seen their baby. She knew very few people in the area, and her life was an endless succession of bills and dirty diapers. She was lonely and depressed, and remarks wondering if it all was worth it had fallen on the virtual ears of a crowd of walking wounded who were determined that history would NOT repeat itself if we could help it.
I entered chat and introduced myself to CryingBaby. Fate was kind in one thing, I was a Navy Brat. I'd grown up seeing and hearing about the things, good and bad, that women with husbands gone for up to a year and a half did. We had an insider's lingo that made her more willing to talk. First an hour or so typing in chat, then she gave me her phone number. (During the time we were in chat anxious friends kept sending me messages that said things like "Don't let this one get away!")
Did I save a life? I don't think so in this case. CryingBaby was stressed, lonely, and depressed when I met her, but having a friend was all she needed. She got more friends, virtual ones, as I introduced her to people online. A couple of them were Navy wives who had been in her shoes, others were just folks to chat with. CryingBaby didn't want to die, she wanted not to be alone. The fact that Xavier had killed himself just a few weeks before had made us oversensitive, and we had gone into a panic without cause.
If you're still reading I'll talk about one more. We'll call him "Billy." Same disclaimers. Billy was 14. His mother was dying. His father was abusive. His sister slept around. Bullies beat him up. Billy told us he wanted to die.
We'd gone from the low of Xavier's suicide to the high of believing we had saved CryingBaby. Hey, we were Hot Stuff, we could help anybody now! Yeah, right. We were chumps just waiting for Billy's mind games.
Bear in mind this was before Google, Wikipedia, or any of the other multitude of online references that we now take for granted. So when Billy told us his mom was suffering from Something Awful we didn't have any quick and easy way of fact checking. This enabled Billy to lead us on for nearly a month. Ultimately his lies got too complex and someone caught on. We didn't want to believe, but we couldn't just write off our friend who thought Billy was a liar. In an effort to show that our friend was mistaken some of us made trips to our local libraries. Billy was indeed a liar.
Billy's mom was fine, she just worked a lot. Dad worked a lot, drank a lot, watched TV a lot. He didn't have a sister. Billy was lonely and wanted attention. He wanted that attention badly enough that he didn't care what he was doing to us. It was a kind of emotional rape that still burns more than twenty years later.
Xavier, CryingBaby, and Billy were all part of the process of forming rules that I try very hard to stick with. These may sound harsh, but they will go a long way towards ensuring your peace of mind in the long run.
- If you don't already know the person, either online or offline, don't get directly involved. If someone asks for help and you know how to do research that might lead to their identity, address, or phone, fine- But let someone who knows them, or at least has already made an emotional commitment to the situation deal with it.
- If you don't know the person well, you can say supportive things. You can even tell their friends that you're worried. Once you've done that, stick with Rule 1.
- You are not a psychological professional. Even if you are one there are barriers in online communication that may cause you to miss an important clue. If at all possible get the person in touch with someone they know offline.
