Internet Sites Biased Towards Supporting Suicide 358
Believe It Or Not, I Care About You writes "According to a new study in the British Medical Journal which examined the search results for various suicide-related search terms, the most common results supported or encouraged suicide. Wikipedia was one of the most prevalent sources of information, particularly on suicide methods, although the Wikimedia Foundation itself does not encourage suicide. Other studies have shown that media coverage has an effect on suicide particularly with respect to influencing the method chosen. Interestingly, this study notes that suicide rates actually decreased with increased Web usage in England, perhaps because support is readily available to anyone who wants it."
Re:What are you going to search for? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:self resolving problem (Score:2, Informative)
Slashdot mods really are fuckwits
Alan Turing (Score:1, Informative)
Life often becomes too difficult to continue for some. It is sad but it is reality. To each his own...
Re:Darwinism (Score:3, Informative)
That would be about the only reason I could think to move to Oregon, but it's nice to know that somebody was thinking the problem through [oregon.gov].
Re:Out with a bang. (Score:4, Informative)
The best source I can readily find is a documentary about suicide bombing ("The Cult of the Suicide Bomber", which is excellent, by the way), where the narrator interviews the family of Iran's most celebrated martyr, Mohammed Hossein Fahmideh.
Bob Baer:"I hope you don't mind me asking, but Hossein was the first suicide bomber, wasn't he?"
Family: "No, not at all. Yes, he did have a very strong belief. He was a martyr. It's impossible to describe him as anything else. A martyr through and through."
Bob Baer: [aside] "It's interesting, they absolutely reject the word 'suicide', even though there was a 100% chance that he would die. It just does not come into the vocabulary; he is simply a martyr."
Does that satisfy your curiosity?
Re:No surprise there. (Score:2, Informative)
There is data available at http://www.who.int/mental_health/prevention/suicide/country_reports/en/index.html [who.int] which contains PDFs split by country.
Here is some badly formatted data form the Japan PDF (at http://www.who.int/entity/mental_health/media/japa.pdf [who.int] )
The age distribution is interesting with the rate increasing and then falling after reaching the age of 65+. I'm not qualified to make any assumptions based on the data, so I'm leaving that somebody else.Re:No surprise there. (Score:3, Informative)
Kamikazes and seppuku committing samurai have nothing to do with modern suicide rates in Japan. Even comparing the age distributions, Japan leads in suicide rates by a wide margin.