Authors: Jamie Bartlett
Unlike mainstream media, there are no real guidelines or rules on reporting threats of suicide. Most suicide forums encourage users to describe how they are feeling, and why – often in an attempt to be supportive, sympathetic and responsive, but with potentially dire results.
David Conibear was a successful computer software engineer in his late twenties, and a frequent and popular user on a.s.h. In late 1992, he posted a new comment on the site:
Hey, fellow ASHers! . . . After a lot of research and a lot more thought, I’ve gone with the KCN dissolved in cold water . . . The computer is programmed to wait 36 hours and then phone 911, to prevent any of my friends discovering the body. This news message is also on a delay timer, just in case there are any closet interventionists lurking. If this DOESN’T work, I’ll try to get someone to post that tidbit to a.s.h. so none of you ends up making the same mistake. Oh, a final note . . . in case the group gets any flak about this, let it be known that a.s.h. was not a promoting cause in my suicide. Had it not been for this group, my best plan to date was to get pissed drunk and dive off the roof of my apartment building (yes, I have a key). I think this is cleaner all ’round. Have a nice life!
It was the first documented online suicide note. David’s body was found the next day. As the news spread on a.s.h., several users wrote
short memorials, describing how saddened they were by the news, how they missed him: ‘Dave, if you can see this post, we’re thinking about you, your spirit lives on in our minds.’ But a number praised him, admiring his actions: ‘Am I the only one who feels a perverse sense of glee when reading this letter?’ wrote one user. Conibear is, somewhat shockingly, referred to as the ‘patron saint’ of a.s.h. A micro-Werther.
The Werther Effect creates a strange and very perverse incentive, which is key to understanding how these communities can be both helpful and harmful. Because self-harm forums are generally supportive, community-minded places, the more you suffer, the more attention you get from others. Academic research has found that the motivations for self-injury and anorexia are often driven by the same underlying causes: it’s a strategy to relieve feelings of anxiety, loneliness, alienation and self-hatred. The more Amelia suffered – and expressed that suffering publicly – the more sympathy and attention she received. For someone with low self-esteem and few friends offline, this was an extremely powerful draw.
In November 2013, this incentive to perform for attention and sympathy was taken to a terrifying conclusion by a twenty-one-year-old Canadian student named Dakota. He posted a disturbing comment on 4chan’s /b/ board that quickly attracted a large and captive audience: ‘Tonight I will be ending my own life. I’ve been spending the last hour making the preparations and I’m ready to go through with it. All that I request is for you guys to link me to a site where I am able to stream it.’
Someone duly created a ‘Chateen’ room, a private chat room in which Dakota could stream his webcam for the 200 or so /b/ users
who had joined the thread. Dakota began streaming, and the room quickly filled with slightly sceptical /b/tards. Many suspected it was a joke. Some tried to talk him out of it; others urged him on: ‘You’re too much of an attention whore to do it. Just fucking do it if you are gonna do it!’ wrote one. ‘Hang yourself on school’s property,’ suggested another.
The news spread rapidly, with thousands of other frustrated users following the developments from /b/. ‘Holy shit, somebody fucking stream it [the Chateen room] . . . what’s wrong with you guys?!’ The Chateen audience provided commentary as Dakota downed sleeping pills and gulped vodka. ‘Holy shit, [he] wasn’t actually a faggot this time.’ ‘YES THIS MAN IS A GENIUS,’ commented another. Others worried: ‘Maybe we should work to try to save this man’s life?’
By this point, Dakota had set fire to his room, and crawled under his bed. Hunched up in a ball, he managed to type: ‘#dead’, ‘#lolimonfire’ and finally: ‘IM FUCK3ED’. Then the screen went dark. ‘I think he’s passed out.’ No one quite knew what was happening. One user proposed a moment of silence.
Suddenly, there was a flash of light. Firefighters broke down the door and rushed in, unaware they were being filmed. They pulled the unconscious Dakota from under his bed, the large luminious yellow stripe on the trousers of one firefighter visible. ‘Op delivered.’ ‘He’s dead. It’s over.’ Op had delivered, but he survived. As he recovered in hospital, his Facebook page was heavily trolled.
The internet hasn’t created self-harming behaviour. Self-injury, eating disorders and suicide rates are not increasing dramatically. Long-term trends show that suicide rates are falling in the UK. There were more suicide pact deaths per head of the population in the late fifties than in the period 1996–2005. Cases of self-injury have increased since the mid-1990s, but not significantly, and appear to have fallen after a peak in 2003.
But the net is changing how these psychological illnesses are expressed and experienced. The people who become part of these worlds are often young, extremely unwell and in need of professional healthcare. But the reason so many join these sub-cultures is because they offer a sanctuary, when there isn’t really anywhere else to go. The ‘Sorry you’re here’ welcome you receive in a.s.h. is often more than you’ll receive from your local GP. People take great comfort in being able to find and speak with others like them without judgement – and that is exactly what so many of these sites provide. It is good to have places to go to speak to other people about your suffering. Sites and forums that reduce feelings of loneliness can be extremely important when it comes to mental health problems. Academic work on the subject, although not conclusive, seems to suggest that peer support groups – if they are carefully moderated by people like Al – can help sufferers, and even nudge them towards medical help. Joe Ferns, Director of Policy, Research and Development at the Samaritans, thinks that it’s important for sufferers to have somewhere where they can openly talk about suicide, self-injury and eating disorders. But he’s worried by the number of
untrained and often very ill people listening, offering advice and information. Everywhere there are micro-Werthers, people whose illness is glamorised and romanticised like Goethe’s hero.
There’s another danger too, explains Joe. Online, you can never be quite sure what advice you’ll receive. Other users may be supportive, sympathetic, but there’s no way of knowing who they really are. In 2008 a nineteen-year-old Canadian girl named Nadia joined a.s.h., and posted that she was feeling suicidal. A user named Cami replied. Cami explained that she also suffered from severe depression. She too had decided to end her life soon. Being a nurse, Cami could also offer some professional know-how.
Cami:
I started looking for methods to let go since ive seen every method used possible at work as a emergency ward nurse i know what does and don’t work so that is why i chose hanging to use ive tried it in practice to see if it hurt and how fast it worked and it was not a bad experience
Nadia:
So when are you going to catch the bus?
Cami:
I would like to soon you?
Nadia:
I am planning to attempt this Sunday
Cami:
wow ok you want to use hanging too? Or can u?
Nadia:
I’m going to jump
Cami:
well that is ok but most people puss out before doing that plus they don’t wanna leave a terribly messy mess for others to clean up
Nadia:
I want it to look like an accident. There’s a bridge over the river where there’s a break in the ice
Cami:
ok otherwise I was gonna suggest hanging
Nadia:
I considered train jumping like, at the subway, but I though this would be better
Cami:
umm yeah if you wanted to do hanging, we could have done it together on line so it would not have been so scary for you
Nadia:
Well if I puss out, I think we should do that
Cami:
ok that sounds good im off work monday too I can die then easily or any time for that matter I w[an]t to bad
Cami:
do you have a web cam?
Nadia:
yes
Cami:
ok well IF it comes down to hanging I can help you with it with the cam p[r]oper positioning of the rope is very important as Ive found out but we’ll cross that path when/if it comes to that hun
Cami:
I hope im being a help to you in some way
Nadia:
yes it’s a big relief to be able to talk to someone about it
Cami:
I wish [w]e [b]oth could die now while we are quietly in our homes tonite :)
Nadia:
since i decided that i will go this weekend, i have felt much better.
Cami:
great im at peace too and if i cant die with you i will shortly after that.
Nadia:
we are together in this
Cami:
yes I promise
[More dialogue]
Nadia:
I must say, I’m feeling a lot better now that I can talk to you
Cami:
it makes me feel better too knowing I won’t die alone
Nadia:
you won’t
Cami:
Monday will be my day wish it were tonite im really at peace with it
Nadia:
i wonder how it will feel to actually die
Cami:
nice
In the early hours of Monday morning, Nadia told her flatmate she was going ice skating. She didn’t return. Her body was discovered six weeks later. But Cami didn’t go through with the pact she’d made with Nadia. In fact, Cami didn’t even exist. Cami was a middle-aged man named William Melchert-Dinkel, a nurse, husband and father. Police now believe he spent several years trawling the internet for suicidal individuals, and may have contacted more than
100 people around the world in efforts to persuade them to kill themselves. Melchert-Dinkel himself believes at least five people actually did, including Nadia.
On my brief foray into the world of self-harm sites I did not discover a deviant and malicious group of people intent on causing harm to others. Although there are people like Melchert-Dinkel out there, these sub-cultures tend to be tight-knit, supportive and caring. They are always there for you. They listen, advise and encourage you. If you are feeling low, they are a natural and easy place to go to relieve your loneliness and suffering. That is precisely why they can be so destructive. By wrapping up negative behaviour in an ordinary, positive and romantic way – by surrounding each user with peer support – it insidiously makes an illness feel like a culture, a lifestyle choice, something to be embraced.
Eventually, Amelia was spending hours a day on pro-ana sites, posting messages about her condition, interacting with others in her community, and barely eating. She had even bought a pro-ana bracelet to wear. When her mother suggested she needed help, she refused to listen, and was terrified about losing her online social life, losing contact with the only people she thought understood her. When her parents took her to hospital, Amelia was immediately transferred to a specialist eating disorder unit. It was six months before she was discharged and finally allowed to return home.
Amelia is now fully recovered, and, for the most part, offline. I ask her what advice she might give to people who are tempted by or trapped inside pro-ana groups, as she was. ‘You need to get help. I know you won’t want to listen. And I didn’t want to listen either. But if you’re actively going on these sites, you’re probably
already in an unhealthy state of mind. You might not think you need help, but just talk to someone anyway. There are people outside the online community who know what you’re going through.’ She pauses. ‘Your pro-ana friends might understand you, but they won’t help you.’
fn1
To protect the identity of the people I mention in this chapter, I have created the composite character of Amelia. All information is derived from interviews I conducted with members of pro-ana websites, and is accurate to the best of my knowledge. I have also cloaked quotes where necessary.
TRANSFORMATIVE TECHNOLOGIES HAVE
always been accompanied by optimistic and pessimistic visions of how they will change humanity and society. In Plato’s
Phaedrus
, Socrates worried that the recent invention of writing would have a deleterious effect on the memories of young Greeks who, he predicted, would become ‘the hearers of many things and will have learned nothing’. When books began to roll off Johannes Gutenberg’s press, many suspected they would be ‘confusing and harmful’, overwhelming young people with information. Although Marconi believed his radio was helping humanity win ‘the struggle with space and time’, as his invention became popular, others feared that children’s impressionable minds would be polluted by dangerous ideas and families rendered obsolete as they sat around listening to entertainment programmes. We don’t know if early
Homo sapiens
argued whether fire burns or warms, but you can hazard a guess that they did.
From its inception, the internet has acted as a canvas on to which we have painted positive and negative pictures of our future.
Several of the Arpanet pioneers were looking beyond data sets and communication networks to a future in which their new technology would radically transform human society for the better. Joseph Licklider, the first director of the team responsible for developing networked computing, and often referred to as the ‘grandfather’ of the internet, predicted as much in 1961, eight years before the first network connection was made between two Arpanet nodes. ‘Computing,’ he proclaimed, ‘will be part of the formulation of problems . . . it will mediate and facilitate communication among human beings.’ It would, he believed, help us to ‘make better collective decisions’.