Facebook Offers Tools for Those Who Fear a Friend May Be Suicidal
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
Not against the idea but thought provoking the several implications of what this data means.
What would constitute humanity progressing? Would evolution count? Would it count if it appeared in the shape of weeding out suicidal people?
The cynic in me says they don't particularly care about the high suicide rate of assembly line factory workers in China, as long as said factory workers don't off themselves while on company property or at the company dormitory. Because that's bad PR, guys.
1: http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/apples-siri-now-prevent-sui...
2: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/2016/04/04/siri-update...
I always thought of suicide as a possibility among others. It’s a normal feeling to be tired of life.
I would have suicided long time ago if suicide wasn’t so complicated and scary, with a huge risk of failure. I don’t want to feel pain, I just want to go. Like in euthanasia.
I checked, and unfortunately not even Switzerland offers the possibility of euthanasia (good death) to healthy people. I really think that’s a society shortcoming, then need to be addressed in the future. What's the problem with suicide at all?
Aside from the horrible impact it has on friends and family (including the risk of it becoming contagious - http://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2016/04/21/47484792... ), many people who attempt suicide and fail later decide that they are glad that they didn't go through with it.
I wish society had the balls to tell the depressed they're obligated to stay here and run out the clock, but beyond that we don't really care how miserable they are. That we'll talk about talking about depression, but not actually talk about depression [0]. That's what a shrink is for, go get one so we don't have to deal with you being mopey (I guess it'll be positive for you, too).
[0] http://hotelconcierge.tumblr.com/post/116790700524/we-need-t...
Sure life is still pointless and kind of meaningless, but I'm having a lot more fun than I would have if I was dead. Unexistence, while easier, doesn't sound nearly as fun.
And besides, how will I ever achieve all those hopes and dreams I had as a 12 year old if I'm dead? I won't. But the longer I stay alive, the more likely it is. "Survive until tomorrow" is, in a sense, the only thing that matters. Or at least the thing that comes the closest to mattering.
We do not actually know that Unexistence would be easier, nor whether or not it would be fun.
I don't intend any disrespect at all. I have attempted suicide and spent plenty of time suicidal. So this is a conclusion I drew in earnestness.
We have no means that I know of to investigate what comes after death, whether or not something survives the physical body, etc. Many people believe in religion and an afterlife or in reincarnation. Others believe nothing survives after the body dies. But, scientifically speaking, we do not actually know.
I am glad you are no longer suicidal.
Peace.
So I figure, why risk it? It could be better, it could be worse, it could be nothing. I have no evidence either way so there's nothing to base the experiment on. And I know that eventually I will find out no matter what I do.
So there really isn't anything to gain from suicide, imho. Better to stay alive as long as possible and do shit om this side.
I also came to this conclusion after much thought.
Things are also somewhat more interesting since if I'm anxious about something, I remember that hey, I am dead, whether its 50 years from now or tomorrow (I think Bushido had something similar?).
Nothing really matters so stop worrying and try to enjoy the grind...
If we define the components of mental illness as being suicidal, obviously that would lead you to classify all suicidals as mentally ill.
For a long time being homosexual was seen as a mental illness and those (probably most) administering treatments saw themselves as helping them and the patient would have a higher quality of life after they were cured. The doctors thought the patient was harming themselves and their family by participating in lewd activities.
Not trying to say one thing or the other about suicide. I just think it is interesting what we consider a mental illness and why and why its dangerous to go to the "mental illness" (I hate this phrasing) reasoning right away.
It was a cultural phenomenon, not mental illness.
Of course, this is subjective, and vulnerable to the no-true-Scotsman fallacy: "if you have decided to commit suicide you must have not possessed all your mental faculties or felt otherwise pressured towards that outcome." Hence find it hard to accept that their choice was made in earnest. (edit: quotes)
I would imagine that bank robbers the moment they get caught instantly regret it. But that doesn't prevent the ones that got away from completing their goal and not regretting it.
People who fail suicide often have HUGE amounts of personal anguish because of the police, hospital, family, etc. all judging them from the suicide attempt.
I think its easy to confuse regret of the action over all and regret that you tried the action and failed. But I imagine there are some who genuinely regret their attempts.
Is suicide bad? Is it immoral? Is it a crime? Should it not be permitted? If it is wrong, immoral, and a crime, should people who attempt it be punished?
Similarly, suicide mostly seems to be impulsive -- if access to a certain method of attempting suicide is reduced, the corresponding decrease in suicide attempts via that method is not reflected in a corresponding rise in suicide attempts via other methods.
Lastly, suicide rarely occurs in the depths of depression. People who attempt to take their own life are much more likely to be heading into or out of a depressive episode.
While these aren't the only reasons that we should attempt to prevent suicides, I feel they provide sufficient counter-evidence to your argument. I will say that I am in favor of physician-assisted suicide, and there is definitely a contingent of people who are hell-bent on killing themselves, but for the most part most people who are suicidal will later be thankful to be alive.
If you'd like to know more, I suggest reading the article on suicide on the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy:
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/suicide/
Edit: Section 3.4 (Libertarian Views and the Right to Suicide) responds to your criticism very directly[1]
If you find that interesting (of if you still find yourself unable to sympathize with those who believe they should attempt to prevent suicides), I'd suggest taking a course on either biomedical ethics, or ethics in general. These topics have been debated for centuries at this point, and there are a number of very compelling arguments on both sides.
[1] This position is open to at least two objections. First, it does not seem to follow from having a right to life that a person has a right to death, i.e., a right to take her own life. Because others are morally prohibited from killing me, it does not follow that anyone else, including myself, is permitted to kill me. This conclusion is made stronger if the right to life is inalienable, since in order for me to kill myself, I must first renounce my inalienable right to life, which I cannot do (Feinberg 1978). It is at least possible that no one has the right to determine the circumstances of a person's death! Furthermore, as with the property-based argument, the right to self-determination is presumably circumscribed by the possibility of harm to others.
No one chose to exist, but I think everyone is entitled to not exist, regardless of their reasons. Even if someone is thankful that they were prevented from taking their own life, that's essentially an argument of the form "the ends justifies the means."
As Camus said, "There is but one truly serious philosophical problem and that is suicide." I think it's up to everyone to decide that for themselves. Preventing people from doing such is unethical, imho.
You have completely misrepresented my argument. Nowhere did I present anything that could even remotely be construed as a consequentialist argument.
I provided that point as a direct rebuttal to your point that if we look at agent-focused moral systems, and ignore agent-neutral moral systems, preventing people from committing suicide doesn't make sense.
> I think it's up to everyone to decide that for themselves. Preventing people from doing such is unethical, imho.
Your opinion is indefensible and insane. What you have implied constitutes prevention is absurdly broad. For instance, from a consequentialist standpoint, calling a friend you fear may be suicidal and asking them to hang out would constitute prevention at least some of the time. Ignoring that issue, the evidence I've presented effectively argues against the idea that most people who attempt suicide wish to kill themselves. Most suicidal individuals are impulsively responding to what the French might call L'appel du vide, or the call of the void. If they were rational, they would not attempt suicide in the first place.
I cannot imagine you actually understand the points Camus is trying to make if this is the conclusion you have come to. Please seek out further education on the subject. Your knowledge of ethics and philosophy is appalling, and ultimately harmful.
I'm sorry you find my ethics so abhorrent, though I often feel that way about the ethics of others.
What else would justify the means? There's nothing wrong with that form of argument.
There are arguments of that form that are wrong, but not because of the form, rather, because either the ends don't justify the means, or because the means produce additional unaccounted costs which offset the value they have in producing the ends. Or, because there are less-costly means to the ends, or because the means don't actually produce the ends used to justify them.
I've never seen a valid argument of that form and I use this particular phrase as a heuristic for validating arguments. If you have examples of arguments that best take that form, I'd be happy to entertain them.
If you want to make the point that certain means are categorically unacceptable, make that argument (which will very quickly, I suspect, get to a root moral axiom on which no debate is possible, simply agreement or disagreement) rather than raising irrelevancies about the form of the argument.
That's not a mental issue, it's cultural.
Not all suicides are the result of mental anguish or impulsive decisions.
Whether or not it's a right can tend to be something of an abstract discussion. But when someone commits suicide, it's not abstract. They die.
And it's not abstract to me, because I've helped prevent the suicides of two friends, and failed to prevent that of a neighbor.
I think there are conditions in which someone can live that is worse than death, and the problem is finding where you draw that line for yourself. For instance, I would prefer death to slavery or permanent incarceration.
This feature provides the pretext for such force.
I generally believe that government shouldn't protect people from themselves. Again, I'm only arguing against using force of law to prevent someone from taking their own life, not talking someone down from the ledge.
Regardless, these questions are asked all of the time. A news article about a new feature on a social media site isn't an appropriate forum for discussing such a ridiculously complex topic as the ethics of suicide. The only way your comment could be less appropriate is if you were advocating for a discussion on the ethics of murder on an article about a murder suicide.
Edit: I suggest checking out the article on suicide on the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. The Encyclopedia as a whole is a great resource, and this article is no different:
Strictly speaking, I don't think that necessarily means that these people are better off surviving. One could imagine that they are in pain that is temporary, but severe enough that they are better off dieing immediately, even taking into account that they are missing out on the life that would otherwise have come after the pain.
By making them stay alive, we are perhaps forcing them into the worse option.
Nowhere in this discussion is there an implication that suicide is wrong, immoral, or a crime, or that the people should be punished; I don't understand why you're even bringing that up.
I find it gruesome. Revoking the right for someone to end their life is torture for some. It's not without reason that's what happens with prison: They keep you forcefully alive. It's also what happens when you're medically assisted and you can't go for euthanasia. It also happens when you're deep in the failure of life: The living will check on you so you don't commit suicide. There are anti-suicide barriers everywhere. There's pretty much no place to commit suicide anymore. And now facebook.
Our civilization relies on removing the right of people from resigning from life. We want them to produce.
Not true. many societies have had the concept of ritual suicide as a matter of honour.
With this in mind, it would be nice if they detected those who might be depressed and tailored the news feed to try to make people happier.
Facebook's entire business model is built around manipulation and control. They do psychological experiments on their users and skew their news feeds to influence their political opinions.
And now Facebook wants me to tag my emotionally vulnerable friends, possibly for further abuse, surveillance and manipulation? For profit? For the good of the state? How much will insurance companies and my future employers need to pay Facebook for the improved psychological profile they're building?
No. If I see anything on Facebook that makes it seem as if someone I know is depressed or needs help, the last thing I'm going to do is make Facebook aware of it.
Do we know if this sort of message causes a person to be more or less likely to take their lives? How can you A-B test that?
Does anyone else think your phone telling you it thinks 'you aren't being yourself anymore' could set someone over the edge?
Actually... you probably could train a model to detect suicidal posts. I had a friend who committed suicide a few months ago, and I didn't see it coming. But looking back, there were signs in his facebook posts (in line with this article's example of thanking everyone), but our conversations were normal. It is at the very least a wishful line of thinking for me that ML can recognize this type of pattern.
Machine classification and analysis of suicide-related communication on Twitter http://orca.cf.ac.uk/76188/
Analysing the connectivity and communication of suicidal users on twitter http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0140366415...
I think they had a talk with Prof Louis Appleby (who pretty much leads suicide prevention in UK): https://twitter.com/ProfLAppleby/status/740957809924308992
I've heard that early versions of this system basically inserted barriers between suicidal people---who are already overwhelmed---and their support networks.
Considering Facebook's poor track record when it comes to handling vulnerable populations (nym policy, location support in Messenger, etc.), I'd strongly discourage anyone from using this reporting system without a complete understanding of what it actually does.
Heed should also be paid to the effect of having more than one of these systems being triggered at the same time. The last thing I need when I'm feeling overwhelmed is a dozen apps on my phone suddenly changing their behavior.
I recently started conducting studies dealing with technology and psychological interventions and had to find ethical (privacy protecting) mechanisms for responding to participants who express suicidal intentions or show several indicators suggesting depression. We ultimately settled on an automated mechanism that suggests resources to the participant directly in cases indicating depression and human intervention on cases expressing suicidal intentions. It isn't perfect but seemed to be the best balance between privacy and helpfulness.
I have been watching this strange story from the sidelines, but I know other people have shown concern as well. If this research can help people like him, I think it would be well worthwhile.
One of the more obvious obstacles will just be noise. The ideal situation is someone who posts a clearly suicidal note late at night and a single friend sees it in time to act...this is the kind of signal that a huge network like FB can uniquely catch because of its size.
But what about all the more ambiguous situations? A friend with hundreds of FB friends has gone through a horrible breakup and other real life failures, and he starts posting notes that are potentially signs of suicidal thought...or, at least a dozen of his hundreds of friends think so, and they all flag it as suicidal. What should FB do then? At least a good number of these incidents will be false positives and people will start complaining about FB's human-backed algorithm for discerning potentially suicidal users.
The imminent danger is that someone will post notes that are suicidal in retrospect, people will flag it, and the user will commit suicide anyway. It won't be FB's fault...after all, AFAIK, they're just offering to send a friendly help screen to the user, not call the cops. But that won't be how the media or the deceased user's friends will see it, and the revelation that FB's powerful network has a human/algorithm hybrid element will be controversial in the same way that the trending news kerfluffle was. Perhaps there will be demands that FB should have done more, and that cops should be involved in the decision making...
But the seemingly inevitable decision would seem to be: why even bother waiting for humans to flag suicidal behavior? For a user who has a history of regular activity on the service, I'm sure there's a general profile they fit in terms of sentiment of messages and reduced engagement on the service, just like FB is reportedly able to tell how soon given couple might break up. Here's no reason why FB couldn't augment a profile with a hidden "depression" index to help the suicide response team triage reports...but the existence of such a calculation will undoubtedly be controversial.
And then there's the question of: if FB can calculate such a depression index, why wait for it to reach a high level before taking action? And, why should action be limited to sending an explicit anti-suicide message? Shouldn't FB be obligated to populate the user's news feed with happier messages, more reminders that they have a family, fewer reminders that their former lovers have found new lovers, etc?
And of course, for more controversy, we could always replace "suicide" with other kinds of unwanted behavior.
I can't shake the feeling that social networks are sleepwalking towards the very primitive versions of whatever the human analogue of a Skinner box is.
I know gamification is a thing. Along with the other types of psychological manipulation in games. But this feels different to me.
I get that suicide prevention is a prima facie positive, but I wonder what Facebook's ethics board has to say about this type of behavior in general.
I guess in 20 years it will probably be just like advertising. We know it's inherently manipulative, but try to ignore what we know to be it's goals. And lie to ourselves and eachother about the extent to which it can alter our behavior.