Testing FB's Suicide Prevention tool

[rhoenix]

Facebook has rolled out a set of tools to keep a check on its users who are having suicidal tendencies and prevent these users from suicidal attempts. In case some user is having suicidal thoughts and mentions that in the Facebook posts and if a friend of that user reports it to Facebook then a third party will immediately review the post and Facebook would lock the suicidal user’s account and the user will be made to read Facebook’s suicide prevention materials.

Shane Tusch, a resident of San Mateo, wanted to check out if this suicide prevention tool is real or not!

On 26th February 2015, Tusch posted his frustrations regarding the stress he had been facing due to first amendment made to his home loan by the bank. He posted that he was undergoing trouble paying his bank debts for quite some time and in the post he declared that he would take his life in some public place.

Tusch’s post read :”So I have decided to take my life in some very public way that will hopefully get people talking about the crimes these banks have payed off are governments and left their wives and kids in the streets. I think hanging myself from the Golden Gate Bridge with a big sign that says bank america killed me and left my wife and kids without a father or a home!”

Tusch’s used his real Facebook profile to carry out the experiment and neither his family nor his friends knew about his experiment. Immediately, Tusch’s friends responded to his frustrations as they were worried about him and one of his friends even tagged Facebook to his post.

Soon Tusch’s Facebook account was locked and in the meantime some unknown person who read this post informed police. San Mateo police took Tusch in their custody and inquired him regarding the post which Tusch confirmed was written by him however he also made it clear to the police that he was not planning for a suicide, this was just to release his frustrations regarding the First Amendment made by Bank America and he wanted to get this in public.

Shane Tusch is a part time electrician by profession and also an activist.

Tusch was detained in a mental asylum for about 72 hours i.e. 3 days. Not only that it seems he was tested for TB, HIV and overall 7 blood tests done along with his urine tests. He also posted that he was kept in a very inhumane conditions.

With the depression being on its peak all around and people attempting suicides it seems that the step taken by Facebook to prevent the users from committing suicide is really good; however there has to be some proper methods which should be taken because if people like Shane Tusch are just using Facebook to release their frustrations on Facebook and get caught then it would be a great problem.

Besides if all people would be retained for 72 hours in mental asylum then that will be a great burden on the already overburdened mental health facilities, isn’t it?

This appears very unacceptably heavy-handed to me. It's one thing to be concerned if someone you care about is contemplating suicide; but linking this to reporting this to authorities and having the person in question involuntarily committed is an outlandish, overly-forceful, and ultimately useless solution. I don't see this actually helping people who are depressed to this degree - they'll simply not post about it on FB if they do after this.

[General Havoc]

This appears very unacceptably heavy-handed to me. It's one thing to be concerned if someone you care about is contemplating suicide; but linking this to reporting this to authorities and having the person in question involuntarily committed is an outlandish, overly-forceful, and ultimately useless solution. I don't see this actually helping people who are depressed to this degree - they'll simply not post about it on FB if they do after this.

Am I the only one who is concerned by the fact that this article is barely legible, riven with basic comprehension errors, and with a title that is directly contradicted by the body of the article itself? What in Christ's name does "the stress he had been facing due to first amendment made to his home loan by the bank" mean? It's only repeated three times over the course of the thing. And I'm sorry, but it is not "Testing FB's suicide prevention tool" when that is not what the man in question did. He posted he wanted to kill himself because he wanted to kill himself. That he changed his mind later makes him just like the 95% of suicides who intentionally fail, not some social engineer seeking to experiment on the system. Moreover, all Facebook did was call the police, in response to what seemed to be a perfectly valid post about killing himself by a man who was preparing to do so. They did not arrange to have him thrown in Facebook Jail or some damn thing. Involuntary institutionalization is what happens when you threaten publicly to kill yourself, and all such institutions perform blood tests for things like TB as a matter of course. Why? SO THAT THE PATIENTS INSIDE DO NOT CATCH TB!!! After all, the most common denizens of these institutions are the homeless and those mentally unfit to care for themselves, both of which are populations rife with infections and sexually-transmitted diseases.

This is not Facebook trampling on someone's rights, or even fucking up. This is exactly how the system is supposed to work. If you stand up in Times Square with a gun to your head and scream that you're going to off yourself, I don't want to hear about how the police are Nazis for tackling you to the ground and thereby causing you to get bruises on your back.

[rhoenix]

Am I the only one who is concerned by the fact that this article is barely legible, riven with basic comprehension errors, and with a title that is directly contradicted by the body of the article itself? What in Christ's name does "the stress he had been facing due to first amendment made to his home loan by the bank" mean? It's only repeated three times over the course of the thing. And I'm sorry, but it is not "Testing FB's suicide prevention tool" when that is not what the man in question did. He posted he wanted to kill himself because he wanted to kill himself. That he changed his mind later makes him just like the 95% of suicides who intentionally fail, not some social engineer seeking to experiment on the system. Moreover, all Facebook did was call the police, in response to what seemed to be a perfectly valid post about killing himself by a man who was preparing to do so. They did not arrange to have him thrown in Facebook Jail or some damn thing. Involuntary institutionalization is what happens when you threaten publicly to kill yourself, and all such institutions perform blood tests for things like TB as a matter of course. Why? SO THAT THE PATIENTS INSIDE DO NOT CATCH TB!!! After all, the most common denizens of these institutions are the homeless and those mentally unfit to care for themselves, both of which are populations rife with infections and sexually-transmitted diseases.

This is not Facebook trampling on someone's rights, or even fucking up. This is exactly how the system is supposed to work. If you stand up in Times Square with a gun to your head and scream that you're going to off yourself, I don't want to hear about how the police are Nazis for tackling you to the ground and thereby causing you to get bruises on your back.

You can say all of these things, and your argument makes sense, but where it breaks down for me is the divide between "declaring publically that you're going to kill yourself" and "posting that you're feeling suicidal on Facebook."

As you said yourself, 95% of those who say such things on places like Facebook are doing it primarily to get attention or compassion from someone else, not because they actually want to end their lives. They want to have a human connection again that helps remind them of why it's important to keep living, and keep moving. They are not contagious, they are not likely to encourage other people to kill themselves too.

A person who goes out in public and shouts to random strangers that he or she is going to off themselves with a gun is a very different matter, because in that situation, there is a clear and present danger of them harming themselves and/or someone else.

The incoherence of the article aside, I simply cannot agree with the reasoning for Facebook choosing to do this.

[frigidmagi]

I have to agree with Havoc here. I've read the article twice now and I'm not sure what it's trying to say. Is the article criticizing facebook? The police? What is the article suggesting we do? It's frankly a mess.

[rhoenix]

I have to agree with Havoc here. I've read the article twice now and I'm not sure what it's trying to say. Is the article criticizing facebook? The police? What is the article suggesting we do? It's frankly a mess.

Oh, I agree - the article appears written by a third grader who has an IV hookup for Red Bull. However, my takeaway from reading was the following:

a) Facebook has implemented this feature to their site
b) a person took it upon themselves to "perform a social experiment" / talk about wanting to off himself (whichever is more likely, and I think we're all leaning toward option #2 here)
c) guy in question was committed for 72 hours before being released.

I admit that the subject hit a button with me, but here's a more coherent article on the subject:

A user from California recently put Facebook's suicide prevention feature to test. According to a report, Shane Tusch shared his frustrations about his bank on the social network and posted a fake-threat to hang himself from the Golden Gate Bridge. A reader swiftly reported his post. As per the prevention service update last month, Facebook locked Tusch out of his account. He should have been in conversation with a crisis worker soon after, but instead he was arrested and placed in a psychiatric institution for a total of 70 hours.

At a time when people are perpetually signed into social networks, online intervention could prove to be a crucial tool in saving lives. According to the CDC, suicide is the tenth leading cause of death across all ages in the US. Facebook first stepped in to help with its reporting tool in 2011. In partnership with suicide prevention organizations, the network eventually found a way to get friends involved beyond likes and comments. Through the service a concerned friend (or, as Tusch claims, a relative stranger) can report a suicide threat to generate a concerned email from Facebook.

Advocates root for the program. But Tusch's experiment underscores the fact that it's hard to tell a hoax from the truth on social media. He contacted Consumer Watchdog to share the repercussions of his Facebook post. And the non-profit sent Mark Zuckerberg a letter last week, asking him to discontinue the "ill-conceived" feature until it was better equipped with safeguards for users.

Facebook's "you matter to us" service is not fool proof. Apart from hoaxes, trolls who thrive in the loopholes of online features could misuse it. But for those who take to social media as a last resort in life, perhaps the benefits of the service trump its potential for being trolled.

A more coherent and dispassionate take, which I think helps. Regardless, I agree that it should have put him in touch with a crisis counselor, if everything worked as it was supposed to. However, him instead being arrested and placed on psych eval is the part that bothers me, far more than FB having the feature to begin with.

[General Havoc]

The man threatened, publicly (let us be clear as to what Facebook is here), to hang himself from the Golden Gate Bridge. If I walked down the street announcing my intention to do this, I would expect the police to be called and consequences to erupt. That he disingenuously claimed later on that he actually had no intention of doing this is irrelevant. Facebook is not and cannot be capable of distinguishing the actual intentions of a person who claims to be suicidal after they have publicly announced their suicidal intention. Neither did Facebook proceed to ask the police to arrest and incarcerate this man while denying him civil rights or abusing him with TB tests. Facebook contacted the appropriate authorities and tipped them off as to the situation, just as any other member of the public might have if they had heard him announcing this, or many might have done just reading his post. That they then chose to involuntarily incarcerate him has absolutely nothing to do with Facebook. The National Suicide hotline network does exactly this when they get someone on the phone who is threatening to imminently kill themselves. This is akin to getting upset at AT&T because the bomb threat I phoned in over their lines got me arrested.

You cannot get upset that a worldwide communications tool did not retroactively do what you think they should have done when the tool in question can only be programmed to react on the most general information. Mr Tusch was indeed thrown into involuntary custody for 72 hours and inconvenienced, but he is alive. How exactly was Facebook to decide that he wasn't serious, or perhaps was serious but was not so serious that he was actually about to do this? How was anyone else to decide this? If Facebook had refrained from calling the cops, instead simply paging a crisis counselor, and Mr. Tusch had gone ahead and hung himself from the bridge or taken an overdose of pills or shot himself through the head, everyone, yourself included, would be in the process of pillorying Facebook as an evil uncaring corporation that did not even do the basic civic requirements of calling the police when someone is about to kill themselves, thanks to their dickish, moneygrubbing ways.

You cannot blame Facebook for taking a suicide threat seriously and reacting to it the same way literally every institution on the Earth reacts to it. The argument about whether involuntary custody or more soft approaches are the right ones to take in the case of suicide is a completely separate issue, and has nothing whatsoever to do with Facebook and its tools.

Facebook did exactly what I would have done in its place.

[rhoenix]

If Facebook had refrained from calling the cops, instead simply paging a crisis counselor, and Mr. Tusch had gone ahead and hung himself from the bridge or taken an overdose of pills or shot himself through the head, everyone, yourself included, would be in the process of pillorying Facebook as an evil uncaring corporation that did not even do the basic civic requirements of calling the police when someone is about to kill themselves, thanks to their dickish, moneygrubbing ways.

Careful with that wagon and that slippery slope. No, I would not have become angry at Facebook as you claimed, because their feature doesn't automatically call the police, and doesn't claim to - something I was rather glad to find out. If it surreptitiously does anyway, then that's a separate issue entirely of being dishonest about their intentions. And, I agree completely with what you yourself said later in your reply - it is not Facebook's responsibility to. I was concerned that they did, and I was quite glad to find out that they did not.

That it offers options such as those posted in the link in my paragraph above I think is a good thing, and I do not disagree with the choices they offer, because in the end they are all choices. Nothing of what is stated to happen is inflicted on someone unnecessarily.

I did state that Facebook itself is to blame, and you're right to say that I was incorrect in that. However, what was not done yet is to reasonably walk through the facts as known so far amidst all this argument. So, I will take the liberty now to walk through the facts as I currently understand them, in an effort to do so.

a) Shane Tusch posts a suicidal thing on Facebook.
b) friend swiftly uses report feature of Facebook.
c) Facebook locked Mr. Tusch out of his account.
d) some person unknown reported this to the San Mateo police.
e) the San Mateo police then questioned Mr. Tusch regarding this post. He stated that he was doing so as a test.
f) he was then involuntarily committed for 72 hours.

So assuming that the tool functions as claimed, and does not, in fact, contact any authorities on its own, then you're right in saying Facebook is not to blame, as according to the article, the San Mateo police were contacted by some person unknown. In this case, the San Mateo police department's chosen response is what caused the issue. Fair enough.

Given the article and the timeline, it seems reasonable to for the police to assume that if they were contacted about this issue, then they should follow up on it just in case, which is why they held him for 3 days. I get their reasoning, and I get their point of view, I just don't agree with how they chose to respond, and think they could have done so far more effectively with less heavy-handedness. However, as you say, that's a separate issue.

I can be reasoned with and use reason Havoc, and I do not require ranting at in order to do either. ;)

[Lys]

Rhoenix, suicidal people do not always respond to interventions by breaking down into tears, confessing their intent, and deciding to step back from the precipice and get a new lease on life. The actual reality is that suicidal people often times become deceitful, conniving, and manipulative in their efforts to keep other people from stopping them from killing themselves. This is, incidentally, one of the hardest things about helping someone who is suicidal. A lot of the time they don't respond by being grateful, instead they become openly bitter and hateful toward you because you stole from them the only chance they had to make everything better.

So when the police interview someone who has made a public threat to kill themselves, they have to treat the matter seriously, and they have to be suspicious about any excuses and explanations made on the subject, because some suicidal people will appear perfectly normal and are willing to say or do anything to forestall any intervention. San Mateo police did not believe Tusch when he said his threat wasn't serious, so he was committed, and in this it is difficult to fault them. They have to make a judgement call on whether the person who issued the threat is serious or not, and they'd better err on the side of caution because there will be no end of public uproar if it turns out they let a truly suicidal person slip through their fingers.

If there is any matter to be upset about, it's how shitty the mental health system is in the United States. Everyone else - Facebook, random bystanders, the San Mateo Police department - all acted responsibly and should not be faulted for doing so.

[rhoenix]

Rhoenix, suicidal people do not always respond to interventions by breaking down into tears, confessing their intent, and deciding to step back from the precipice and get a new lease on life. The actual reality is that suicidal people often times become deceitful, conniving, and manipulative in their efforts to keep other people from stopping them from killing themselves. This is, incidentally, one of the hardest things about helping someone who is suicidal. A lot of the time they don't respond by being grateful, instead they become openly bitter and hateful toward you because you stole from them the only chance they had to make everything better.

So when the police interview someone who has made a public threat to kill themselves, they have to treat the matter seriously, and they have to be suspicious about any excuses and explanations made on the subject, because some suicidal people will appear perfectly normal and are willing to say or do anything to forestall any intervention. San Mateo police did not believe Tusch when he said his threat wasn't serious, so he was committed, and in this it is difficult to fault them. They have to make a judgement call on whether the person who issued the threat is serious or not, and they'd better err on the side of caution because there will be no end of public uproar if it turns out they let a truly suicidal person slip through their fingers.

If there is any matter to be upset about, it's how shitty the mental health system is in the United States. Everyone else - Facebook, random bystanders, the San Mateo Police department - all acted responsibly and should not be faulted for doing so.

I must hereby give you props for this post, Lys. Its tone and content were quite enough to talk me down about this, and for that I thank you.

You and the others are right in that the police must and should respond to any issues such as this, and they must also treat them seriously. Assuming or even allowing the possibility of "oh he's just joking" when faced with a possible suicide threat is counterproductive at best, and can lead to someone actually taking their lives when you didn't think they would at worst.

I still don't necessarily agree with the specific tactics used, and I still think that a better way could have been done, even assuming that Tusch was completely serious with what he said. However, given how the San Mateo police followed things here, I can't really blame them for the response they chose.