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Comment by ancarda | Hacker News Reader

Does he have any experience with suicides? Has he lost anyone or felt suicidal himself? People who have know how difficult it is.

The app was described as a "social network". As someone who has experience with suicide (both from my perspective and from losing people), I have to question what a difference that will make. How exactly does it work? If he can't explain, perhaps a mockup of the UI might answer a lot of questions.

Of course it has the potential to help someone. Everything has potential but how realistic is that? The chance that this will make a difference seems really low to me.

I hate to be the negative guy on HN but suicide is a serious matter and I can't see why anybody would give grants to 15 year olds to build 'apps' to 'prevent it'.

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I expect it works like this a) run an awareness campaign about suicide prevention disguised as a competition among young people to get them talking about and thinking about suicide prevention. Probably do some education in there labelled as 'how to come up with good ideas for our competition', with increased interest due to a potential 'win money!!' hook. b) who knows, maybe you'd actually get some worthwhile ideas, or something useful could be created. Not really the point, more of a bonus if it happens. But the winners will continue to be aware of the problem, possibly become evangelists, and you can get some more publicity when they release their thing later = more awareness.

So, it's probably not realistic to assume this particular app will help. The chance that it will make an actual difference is probably pretty low. Is that reason enough to dismiss the idea? Or to dismiss "apps" entirely as a possible tool for helping suicidal people? I said this below, but unless suicide is an area where you have more potential to cause harm than to do good, it seems like a worthwhile direction to spend resources.

>Is that reason enough to dismiss the idea?

Usually, no. But we're not dealing with "will my photo sharing startup succeed?"

>unless suicide is an area where you have more potential to cause harm than to do good

It's extremely difficult to give good advice to a suicidal person. Almost everything can be interpreted as negative. Your dealing with someone who is in a dangerous mind set. Even telling someone "it'll get better" can make it worse. This is why I stressed the importance of experience.

Some information: http://www.reddit.com/r/SuicideWatch/comments/1cep2h/psa_wha...

>but unless suicide is an area where you have more potential to cause harm than to do good, it seems like a worthwhile direction to spend resources.

Um, yes, you have serious potential to cause serious harm.

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