Without a safety net, dead on the Net

The death of a teenager at his own hand, made known online as it was happening, raises questions about suicide prevention

On Nov 30, a 19-year-old man in Sichuan province killed himself by taking sleeping pills and filling his room with carbon monoxide fumes. From 8 am until 2 pm he tweeted his thoughts and actions, often accompanied with photos, until he passed out.

This was not the first suicide broadcast live via social media, and doubtless it will not be the last. From what is known, there seems to have been no foul play. The young man, surnamed Zeng, started an online relationship with a woman and a week later she wanted to end the relationship. But he could not take no for an answer.

As soon as he began to upload messages and photos about his intentions, his followers alerted local police and they immediately tried to find him. It took several hours to do so, and by the time they and Zeng's relatives broke into his room, he was unconscious. He died shortly after being taken to a hospital.

The main point of contention is some of the messages left on Zeng's microblog while he was sending out dozens of tweets. While the bulk encouraged him to stay calm and not do anything foolish - and some even gently tried to get him to divulge his location so police could find him, a few messages took the opposite tack: They ridiculed him for being a fool and a coward, and some even egged him on.

Many of these people are probably ashamed of themselves now because they have deleted traces of their responses. Some went so far as to say the world is better off without "idiots" like Zeng - and they said this after authorities confirmed his death.

Yes, Zeng's fixation on the woman he had never met and had known through social media for just a week was senseless, but at his age it is understandable. You can say it is not really love and it is irrational. But most people at this age go through periods of immaturity and may suffer from bouts of helplessness that could end in tragedy. Unlike Zeng, most get through it without harming themselves or others.

Some accused Zeng of emotionally kidnapping the woman who wanted to jilt him. This seems partly true. By broadcasting his suicide on social media, it was not only a direct appeal to her, but an indirect appeal to others in a conscious or subconscious effort to pressure her. However, one thing is clear: Zeng was not totally committed to killing himself. He was not one of these who would die regardless of how much help is offered. He wanted to live. Had he withstood this, he might be well on his way to other amorous affairs and even laugh at his own sophomorically romantic sentiments, though he did not cite Goethe's young Werther as a precedent.

Did the jeers put him between a rock and a hard place so he felt he had no choice but to carry his threat through? Without further evidence it is hard to reach such a conclusion. Some of the jeering crowd probably did not mean ill because words of empathy were expected and harsh words like theirs might shock him back to his senses. It may work in some circumstances and with people of certain dispositions.

But this kind of risk is better left to suicide prevention experts armed with professional skills in handling such touchy situations. Given the recent trickle of online-abetted suicides, I wonder why no professional teams became involved. An expert responding to Zeng's tweets would have had many times the success rate of warding off the tragedy than a person with no preparation other than good intentions.

China's suicide rate is dropping dramatically as rapid urbanization removes the personal dynamics that existed in rural areas that induced impulse suicides and the easy availability of insecticides. However, Zeng's case is not typical of rural women who got into trivial family feuds and threw a bottle of poison down their own throats. On the contrary, he might have been saved had he lived on a farm. In a rural community, one has little privacy but easy access to people one can talk to and let off steam or cry over thwarted love as in this case. Zeng was living in an apartment, and his family members were unaware of what was going on until police contacted them.

In China, most suicides are forestalled because the living environment is closely knit and family and friends act as psychologists who hear out your grievances or emotional frustrations. We have not reached the stage when one would turn to a psychiatrist or a charity hotline for help.

So, the first question that popped into my mind was: Did Zeng have any friends he could confide in? He did tell his grandmother he was seeing someone online, but she treated it as a laughing matter partly because he was still a teenager and partly because it was a virtual fling with little probability of fruition.

Most youngsters would rather trust a friend, who would do everything possible to nip the suicidal whim in the bud. While an expert is professional, a personal friend provides the shoulder to cry on, often literally. That person would sit with you throughout the night, for days or weeks, until you are out of the woods. He or she would not smirk at you for your imprudence, and may even risk failing grades or losing a job because of the full-time engagement with you. That person would treat the matter just as seriously, but be rational while you are temporarily unhinged.

I'm sure this is not just a cultural phenomenon, but this kind of bonding seems more common among the young. Then of course parents are the most reliable of emotional pillars, even though they may scold you for being childish. Unfortunately, Zeng was deficient in this respect. His parents divorced when he was little, leaving him to his mother's care, and his mother moved away after she remarried. He grew up with his maternal grandmother.

In other words, he was like one of those tens of millions of "left-behind children" whose parents are absent mostly for job reasons. That absence, coupled with the usual rebelliousness of adolescence, tends to make them more vulnerable than their peers to emotional and growth-related difficulties. While regular teenagers may have several layers of safety net to catch them when they stumble, be it friends, families or schools, the black hole that is the Internet seemed to be Zeng's only resort.

Of course, I have to caution myself against too much conjecture. The public knows too little about his family or his mental world to make intelligent hard-and-fast comments on the case. But as a rule of thumb, youngsters of that age need several cushions to help them cope through the rollercoaster of growing pains. Most pull through even bigger ordeals stronger than before; some survive with scars; and a few may not make it. We may not be able to help every one of them, but we should not stop weaving that safety net so that it will catch more and more of them if they fall.

The writer is editor-at-large of China Daily. Contact him at raymondzhou@chinadaily.com.cn

(China Daily Africa Weekly 12/05/2014 page30)