Internet-driven suicides should raise alarms

• Source: The Global Times
• [07:48 May 14 2009]
• Comments

By Ao Lin

There is a disturbing trend in the Republic of Korea (ROK): joint suicides linked to online suicide communities. According to Korean media reports, in April, five joint suicides involving 21 people occurred in Gangwon Province alone, causing 12 deaths. Some victims were affiliated with a Korean online suicide community.

It is reported that suicides instigated online increased sharply in the ROK from 491 in 2007 to 768 in 2008.

In a recent radio speech, ROK President Lee Myung-bak spotlighted the urgency of the suicide issue by lamenting the loss of life and condemning the existence of pro-suicide websites. The ROK police recently launched a campaign to crack down on all Korean pro-suicide websites.

The ROK is one of the world's most wired countries, which may contribute to the rise of Internet-driven suicides in the country. But the ROK isn't the only country suffering from the trend: Since the advent of the Internet, Internet-driven suicides have occurred everywhere the web is popular, including Japan, the US, Canada, Britain, and China. They represent a new type of suicide that has not been addressed adequately.

Influential sociologist Emile Durkheim distinguished between four major types of suicide: egoistic suicides, in which cases people committing suicide were “excessively individuated,” and altruistic suicides, in which cases people killed themselves for their communities. The other two were anomic and fatalistic suicides.

Egoistic suicides have been the main type of suicide in the modern world, due to the rise of individualism. Durkheim identified a lack of social ties as a cause of this type of suicide.

In Internet-driven suicides, people take their own lives for egoistic reasons, but are driven by the social groups they belong to, the virtual communities connected by the Internet that push their members to die. Here, social ties do not mitigate, but rath boost, suicide attempts that might not otherwise occur.

Pro-suicide websites and online suicide communities boost the number of people killing themselves by providing common dark themes and emotional support to their members. Ending one's own life is a difficult choice, and joining online suicide communities, chatting or meeting with pro-suicide people, and reading pro-suicide information online reinforces struggling individuals' determination to die.

Many Internet-driven suicides resemble cult suicides, as they are committed jointly. But there are differences: Internet-driven suicides are much less formally organized. More importantly, while cult suicides are committed for religious reasons, Internet-driven suicides have no common goal beyond self-destruction.

This new type of suicide poses a real threat in the information age, one which needs to be studied and dealt with as soon as possible.