Social Networks Cause Suicides among Teenagers

Social networks not only make suicidal behavior normal, but they even glorify it among adolescents, which encourages them to increasingly depart from life. Such a shocking conclusion was reached by the researchers from Australia.

Every week in Australia a child commits suicide, as evidenced by the relentless statistics. Yet another 50-60 children and adolescents are hospitalized every week after the attempts to harm themselves. Boys voluntarily try to commit suicide two times more often than girls. As established by Australian scientists, social networks play an important role in the development of suicidal behavior in adolescents.

For example, one boy decided to commit suicide after he saw what grief the suicide of another young man had caused and how many “likes” the messages of condolence had collected on his page. For many adolescents, suicide is just another status on their page, which should draw a record number of visitors; many do not even realize that they actually kill themselves.

Social networks, as the researchers have found, give young people a certain kind of psychological satisfaction through suicidal behavior. As the Internet and mobile phones have completely replaced the traditional means of communication of children and adolescents, the access of this category of users to information about suicides has increased significantly, and the topic of suicide has become more popular.

More than 2,000 young people from Queensland, for example, are subscribers to the pages dedicated to the memory of teenagers who have recently committed suicide. The majority of the subscribers never knew of the existence of these adolescents when they were alive. However, they are consciously and subconsciously jealous because of that amount of grief and love that the dead teenagers get and want to experience something similar themselves.

Meanwhile, the teenage psyche is so fragile that almost everyone can find some “worthy” cause for suicide. In addition, the Internet has a huge number of websites that glorify suicide, the very culture of suicide, as well as talk about the many ways of how to die for sure. All this contributes to the suicidal behavior of adolescents, causing serious disturbance among experts.