Dread Lörd Kaolian wrote:
This is the kind of scenario that gives me nightmares. We have over the years had several suicide-ish dramas in various forums. Three of those that I was involved with at least perephrerailly were serious enough that police were called.
The nightmare for us admins, is what happens if we lock the thread? Remove the audiance, remove the reason for them to off themselves live on our site? or remove the audiance, and push them over the edge so they kill themselves. Its a really, really tough call. And no, they don't pay any of us enough to deal with that sh*t.
How do you judge a suicide threat over text? There are too many people, and not all of them are people I "know" well enough to make a determiniation. Is "If they change my class stats one more time, I swear to god I'll kill myself" ok? What about "I swear to god I'll kill myself"? What if its a 1 post wonder troll? Context only goes so far, and I have to err on the side of caution.
The way I look at it, is so long as it doesn't seem "serious" leave the thread open, monitor, nuke "encouraging" comments immidiatly, and watch for it to develope further. Usually there are a flurry of side PMs too which we get forwarded that let us help monitor the situation. If it looks like they are actually serious in any way, we call the police and lock the thread.
Then we wait.
if locking the thread causes someone to kill themselves, I think i'm prepared to accept that as a consequince, because at least if they were going to do that anyways, its now private and the rest of the forum didn't have to watch.
No one should ever have to see someone else die. You lose a bit of your soul each time.
Thats one of the reason I am so harsh on people who try and push the limits of the image system in the forum. In my past security and intel career I saw things that make me very thankful I never remember my dreams. There are things I never want to see again. Things I can't see again.
I won't let some @#%^ killing themselves on my forum get added to the list.
In response to your concern this is a private owned site. So the owner part is legally allowed to apply any censorship it may see fit. Simply putting up a rule about instant-delete of any posts threatening or encouraging to commit a crime or suicide is more than enough.
As for shutting them up and having them killing themselves in response. I don't have the time right now to check reliable sources of information about the topic, but to the best of my understanding in this regard journalists and the like have, for ethical and other reasons, a code about not publishing certain information about people who commit suicide/murder in ways that seem intended to provoke public scandal. This is because there's people who want to commit suicide/murder in a way that causes a scandal and if they are shown that they can do it and how, they will feel encouraged to do so.
In my city there was a case with people suiciding by throwing themselves into the rails of the subway system. For decades the subway system had been in place without any incident, so the first time it happened it became a press scandal. Shortly after the press scandal more people started suiciding this way until it actually became common. As of now they no longer report subway suicides. When it happens, the personnel responsible for operating the subway system even just tell passengers that the cause for delays is mechanical or electrical, you only find out the real version if you happened to know someone who witnessed the event. The number of suicides is rumored to have significantly decreased since they stopped being reported but again I am unable to find a reliable source of information to quote on it.
As for liability, certain forms of verbal abuse against a person can be subject to legal action in some places. I'm not a lawyer and I'm not into the details of this, but I was told so by a lawyer. For obvious reasons it is extremely unlikely you will ever see anyone take action about verbal abuse from a forum post, but should it happen I believe the site and admins are not liable unless they act in blatant complicity with the offending part. Encouragement to commit a crime is also considered a crime and can be a cause for prosecution but again I'm pretty sure the site and admins are not liable unless complicity can be proven.
Quote:
I understand that depression is a disease and all, but I really think these perfectly healthy, wallowing in self-pity folks should pay a visit to a Shriners Hospital for Children and explain to a 4 year old that's fighting for her life because of something truly tragic how their own life is too painful to endure.
Psychological problems may not have physical manifestations, and may not impede the body from continuing to perform it's life support processes, but they are very much very real problems. A person who's psyche has weakened to the point where they would suicide is just as incapacitated to continue with life as someone who's lungs have been perforated by a bullet.
We are of course of a different perception because we cannot forcefully prevent from dieing someone who's vital organs have been damaged, but we can forcefully stop someone from performing suicide.
There are for example, people who's lives are full of everything that anyone would envy. Nice family, plenty of money, friends, love, material and spiritual benefits not ever lacking once in their lives and yet they may be doomed to suicide simply because they never learned to cope up with their problems by themselves and nobody ever taught them. By lacking this simple yet crucial ability they are so fragile that their lives can be easily destroyed by the simplest issues, yet the cause was not the "external" problem, but the inner psychological handicap of being unable to handle their problems.
Society is forgetting that being strong in the face of adversity is as important as any of the other moral values that you can teach to your kids, it is in fact one value that has a significant impact on their survival.
Edited, Nov 26th 2008 10:59pm by xorq
