Exploring Timelines of Confirmed Suicide Incidents Through Social Media

Suicide is one of leading causes of death worldwide, yet little data is available about the lives of suicide victims because most people do not seek treatment. Research has shown that people express suicidal ideation in social media, which can potentially be tapped to improve our understanding of the thoughts and behaviors of people prior to suicide. In this work, we introduce a novel dataset of Chinese social media accounts of 130 people who committed suicide between 2011 and 2016. We describe the demographic and geographic composition of the users, then conduct a longitudinal text analysis of their post histories, showing observable changes in content leading up to the time of death. With encouraging exploratory findings, we discuss directions for future research.

[1]  Andrew Booth,et al.  Attitudes Toward the Ethics of Research Using Social Media: A Systematic Review , 2017, Journal of medical Internet research.

[2]  Mark Dredze,et al.  Examining Patterns of Influenza Vaccination in Social Media , 2017, AAAI Workshops.

[3]  Mark Dredze,et al.  Assessing the Validity of Online Drug Forums as a Source for Estimating Demographic and Temporal Trends in Drug Use , 2016, Journal of addiction medicine.

[4]  Mark Dredze,et al.  Discovering Shifts to Suicidal Ideation from Mental Health Content in Social Media , 2016, CHI.

[5]  Ryen W. White,et al.  Search and Breast Cancer , 2016, ACM Trans. Web.

[6]  Chris Callison-Burch,et al.  The Gun Violence Database: A new task and data set for NLP , 2016, EMNLP.

[7]  Tingshao Zhu,et al.  Distributed under Creative Commons Cc-by 4.0 Creating a Chinese Suicide Dictionary for Identifying Suicide Risk on Social Media , 2022 .

[8]  Xin Li,et al.  Topic Model for Identifying Suicidal Ideation in Chinese Microblog , 2015, PACLIC.

[9]  Tingshao Zhu,et al.  Attitudes towards suicide attempts broadcast on social media: an exploratory study of Chinese microblogs , 2015, PeerJ.

[10]  Mark Dredze,et al.  Detecting Changes in Suicide Content Manifested in Social Media Following Celebrity Suicides , 2015, HT.

[11]  D. Lester,et al.  Twitter postings and suicide: An analysis of the postings of a fatal suicide in the 24 hours prior to death , 2015 .

[12]  Ryen W. White,et al.  Diagnoses, Decisions, and Outcomes: Web Search as Decision Support for Cancer , 2015, WWW.

[13]  Tingshao Zhu,et al.  Identifying Chinese Microblog Users With High Suicide Probability Using Internet-Based Profile and Linguistic Features: Classification Model , 2015, JMIR mental health.

[14]  H. Christensen,et al.  Detecting suicidality on Twitter , 2015 .

[15]  Lei Zhang,et al.  Using Linguistic Features to Estimate Suicide Probability of Chinese Microblog Users , 2014, HCC.

[16]  Tingshao Zhu,et al.  Detecting Suicidal Ideation in Chinese Microblogs with Psychological Lexicons , 2014, 2014 IEEE 11th Intl Conf on Ubiquitous Intelligence and Computing and 2014 IEEE 11th Intl Conf on Autonomic and Trusted Computing and 2014 IEEE 14th Intl Conf on Scalable Computing and Communications and Its Associated Workshops.

[17]  Michael J. Paul,et al.  Twitter Improves Influenza Forecasting , 2014, PLoS currents.

[18]  Aron Culotta,et al.  Estimating county health statistics with twitter , 2014, CHI.

[19]  P. Yip,et al.  Suicide rates in China from 2002 to 2011: an update , 2014, Social Psychiatry and Psychiatric Epidemiology.

[20]  Eric Horvitz,et al.  Predicting Depression via Social Media , 2013, ICWSM.

[21]  Qijin Cheng,et al.  Responses to a self-presented suicide attempt in social media: a social network analysis. , 2013, Crisis.

[22]  D. Ben-Zeev,et al.  Ethical Considerations and Social Media: A Case of Suicidal Postings on Facebook , 2012 .

[23]  Funda Kivran-Swaine,et al.  Grief-Stricken in a Crowd: The Language of Bereavement and Distress in Social Media , 2012, ICWSM.

[24]  Jennifer D. June,et al.  Social media and suicide: a public health perspective. , 2012, American journal of public health.

[25]  Garyfalia Ampanozi,et al.  Suicide announcement on Facebook. , 2011, Crisis.

[26]  W. Shrank,et al.  Online Social Networking by Patients with Diabetes: A Qualitative Evaluation of Communication with Facebook , 2011, Journal of General Internal Medicine.

[27]  David Lester,et al.  The Final Hours: A Linguistic Analysis of the Final Words of a Suicide , 2010, Psychological reports.

[28]  Pozi Liu,et al.  Suicide in China: Unique demographic patterns and relationship to depressive disorder , 2008, Current psychiatry reports.

[29]  D. de Leo,et al.  Social modeling in the transmission of suicidality. , 2008, Crisis.

[30]  Michael I. Jordan,et al.  Latent Dirichlet Allocation , 2001, J. Mach. Learn. Res..

[31]  A. Leenaars,et al.  Suicide notes of adolescents: A life-span comparison. , 2001 .

[32]  D. Peck.  Evaluation of a Suicide Diary: A Content and Situational Analysis , 1989 .