Teens form suicide pact on BeBo with seven victims so far | Hacker News Reader

Teens form suicide pact on BeBo with seven victims so far

telegraph.co.uk

7 pointsAlex391712 comments

Seven children dead by their own hand within a year. "How do you protect your children from the Internet?" asks the Telegraph.

The same year (in the U.S.), at least 5,000 teens die in car accidents, the leading cause of death for teenagers. Where are the articles about how to protect your children from cars?

If dozens of teens started purposely driving their cars into trees then you would probably see those articles.

Why dozens? I thought our threshold was seven, in which case I would be surprised if that doesn't happen every year. In fact, I'll bet far more than seven teen suicides a year would, if they could be interviewed after the fact, cite suburban boredom (and thus the automobile and its transformative effects on society) as the reason for their suicide.

My point was just that this article is the same sort of garbage I thought we'd finally moved past ten years ago. In the 1990s, you could barely open a newspaper or watch TV news without seeing a story about all the scary dangers of the Internet. Child predators can reach through the screen and snatch your children away! If you ever buy anything online, you might as well declare bankruptcy now because your identity will be stolen! Images of breasts turn children into axe murderers!

Please.

"How do you protect your teenager from X?" is almost always the wrong question. The right question is "How do you raise your children so that they become well-adjusted young adults who don't want to drive recklessly, off themselves and the like?". Unfortunately, the latter is both a hard problem and a poor sensationalist headline.

I'm reminded of Malcolm Gladwell discussing suicide as a contagious act in "The Tipping Point".

I've heard discussions of why local news papers do not report teen suicides as suicides in obituaries for precisely the reason of copy cat effects in the community.

I'm have not read 'The Tipping Point' but surely it makes similar arguments. The question I would like to know answered is if the Telegraph is helping the situation through improved discussions on teen suicide and the need to help youth suffering from depression or will they spawn copy cat effects by broadcasting nationally/world wide of a suicide craze. I certainly hope that the youth in the community are helped and that this fad is stopped.

While the copycat fear is valid, I think in the longrun suppressing information about teen suicide can't be a reliable way to prevent it.

To reliably prevent teen suicide, you need to have error correction -- when someone has a mistaken idea about it, you persuade them of a better idea. This requires providing accurate information, not hoping they'll never think of bad ideas in the first place.

True, but the article is not focusing on information to correct mistaken ideas, but on the rise of a terrible fad among teens in several small communities. The article tells how some kids think it is 'cool', that those who have followed receive attention after they are gone in the form of websites, and that it is easier to discuss and deal with feelings on social websites instead of with family members or mental health professionals. I am just worried that a youth viewing such a news article might receive the wrong impression.

I do agree with you, but I still have criticism with this article specifically. They do not even give information on hot-lines, websites, or anonymous groups to help those who need/want help.

Robert Cialdini devotes a chapter to this in his book "Influence", which is an utterly brilliant classic on social psychology.

That is extremely creepy.

The idea of teens killing themselves because it is the current fad sounds like something from the Onion or another satire news. The fact that it's real is unsettling.

That is some brilliant marketing by Facebook right there.

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