After a suicide, more survivors seek support online. Does it help or hurt?

Dylan Thomas Doyle was a junior in college traveling abroad when he learned that his friend Jack had committed suicide in his home country. Shocked, but reluctant to talk to his friends in person, he turned to online grief support sites like Facebook and Reddit.

Ten years later, while working as a hospital chaplain and Unitarian Universalist minister, he lost two more loved ones to suicide. He again found solace online, this time in a subreddit specifically created for grieving after suicide.

“All grief is hard, but suicide is often sudden, traumatic, and has a lot of social stigma. No one knows what to say, so you can feel very isolated,” said Doyle, now a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Information Sciences at CU Boulder. “It’s reassuring to go to these places and hear people say, ‘I’ve been there. I know what you’re feeling.'”

But as Doyle describes in two new studies, such spaces can also be harmful, exposing emotionally vulnerable people, including children, to shocking stories, unhelpful comments and other potentially re-traumatizing content.

The studies, published in the Proceedings of the AAAI International Conference on Web and Social Media and the ACM reports on human-computer interactionare among the first to investigate what happens in bereavement support groups for people who have committed suicide.

“It’s great that these communities exist,” said Doyle, who is now working to make them safer. “But right now it’s kind of a free ride.”

The power of sharing stories

An average of 132 people in the U.S. commit suicide every day. More than half of the population will grieve for a loved one who died this way at some point. Professional help can be hard to find, as suicide grief counseling is specialized. A recent study found that 62% of people grieving for a loved one who died by suicide turn to social media for support.

For their research, Doyle and his co-authors examined nearly 2,600 posts and 16,502 comments in the subreddit r/SuicideBereavement.

The team used natural language processing (AI) technology to understand users’ emotional states and identify different types of messages, from long stories to short questions or requests for resources.

They found that nearly half of the content posted was narrative stories and many of those stories were extremely graphic.

When the team noticed that a large proportion of users were writing letters to the deceased, they launched a companion study in which they read 189 such messages and 652 responses.

The messages were anonymized and the research team made sure they took good care of their own mental health.

“Even as researchers, we had trouble reading some of these texts,” Doyle said.

Some of the letter writers shared how they found out and how it affected them. Others asked for explanations or forgiveness for not doing enough. One shared a story about a final trip he and the deceased took to the mountains and how much they laughed afterwards. Many commenters responded with comfort, reassurance, gratitude, and offers of direct support off-platform.

But some shared detailed accounts of how they found their loved ones or how their deaths were carried out. Some expressed anger and hatred at being left behind.

The team was pleased to find that there were almost no intentionally offensive comments, but they did find some comments that they deemed “unsupportive,” where people responded with their own shocking stories.

“Some people come there just looking for information or asking factual questions. They don’t expect people to tell stories about really disturbing images,” Doyle said.

Because of the way social media algorithms work, the most explicit comments rose to the top and generated more comments.

“If you’re, say, 13 years old and you encounter this and you start to absorb it all, it can be really damaging,” he said. “And for people who are already in a vulnerable emotional state, it can be damaging to their grieving process.”

Building a more supportive platform

Doyle stressed that he’s not criticizing Reddit specifically, but rather asking questions about how social media platforms can more effectively support people in their grief after suicide. He believes more research is needed, and doesn’t think banning narratives on platforms is the answer. (Previous research has shown that in offline support groups, such stories can be extremely therapeutic.)

He does believe that platforms can serve users better.

Currently, moderators of the r/SuicideBereavement subreddit are not required to have any certification or training in mental health.

The homepage of the site clearly states that it is forbidden to post “actively suicidal content”. It states that this is only allowed for relatives of people who have committed suicide.

But the subreddit, like an NFL or travel subreddit, has few restrictions.

Doyle envisions a day when, using the AI ​​tool his team developed, narrative posts could be categorized and users, when they log in, could indicate whether or not they wanted to see those posts.

He also suggests that moderators receive training on grief counseling and that users be given the ability to customize what they want to see at the top of their feed.

“Social media platforms in general don’t know how to deal with death or the bereaved,” he said. “We believe more needs to be done to adapt these spaces to the unique needs of the grieving person.”