New Social Media Guidelines Offer Tips for Talking Effectively About Mental Health and Suicide Online

By Brian Dyak, President & CEO of Entertainment Industries Council, Inc. and co-lead of the Action Alliance Public Awareness and Education Task Force

Social media has become ubiquitous. People communicate online about their lives and get their information about the world from sites like Facebook, Twitter and blogs. When one in four people experience mental health challenges each year, social media is a place where some will turn to talk about their experiences, to seek support from their friends and to find helpful information. Social media offers a venue in which people are more comfortable discussing their own mental health issues, which in turn increases the likelihood that others will seek help when they need it.

With that in mind, the Entertainment Industries Council’s TEAM Up project has just released the first-of-its-kind Social Media Guidelines for Mental Health Promotion and Suicide Prevention. These new guidelines are designed to assist individuals and organizations in safely and effectively talking about mental health and suicide-related issues via social media. With tips for posting and responding on Facebook pages, groups, Twitter feeds, Tumblr pages, websites and blogs and more, the guidelines take into account the unique safety, privacy and stigma-related aspects of these issues.

The recommendations in this document were reviewed by experts in social media and the related health fields. Organizational supporters of the Guidelines include the National Action Alliance for Suicide Prevention, California Mental Health Services Authority, Facebook Inc. and leading journalism organizations the National Association of Broadcasters and Radio Television Digital News Association.

“Whether you want to share your own story, discuss events in the news or help others understand mental illness and encourage them to seek help when they need it, these recommendations will be a helpful resource for everyone, especially in teaching children and teens how to communicate about these issues. Safe, constructive communication via social media, that avoids stigmatizing or derogatory language and does no harm, changes the conversation and decreases discrimination,” said Brian Dyak, Entertainment Industries Council, President and CEO and Co-Chair National Action Alliance for Suicide Prevention Public Awareness & Education Task Force, when the Guidelines were released.

“Social media makes it easier than ever to connect and share with the people you care about,” said Joe Sullivan, Chief Security Officer, Facebook and Co-Chair of the National Action Alliance for Suicide Prevention Public Awareness & Education Task Force. “Knowing effective ways to seek input and offer support to your friends and families about difficult topics is an important part of building a safe online community."

“The guidelines have been reviewed by experts in social media and the related health fields. When communicating online avoiding descriptions and images of suicide acts or methods can help reduce the risk of suicide contagion. Anyone can use this new tool to help someone who may be in crisis and potentially help save a life,” Executive Director, Suicide Awareness Voices of Education Dr. Dan Reidenberg commented.

Social media can be instrumental in bringing about social change – by spreading ideas from person to person, by bringing people together for a common purpose, by sharing and reinforcing social norms and by making it easy for people to take action. Social media is not about the technology, but rather it’s about people talking to people, often on a massive scale. By using these powerful tools in a strategic way, and encouraging others to do so as well, we can harness their power to change how people think about mental health and suicide prevention.

Visit TEAM Up for more information.

Facebook & Suicide Prevention

By Joe Sullivan, Chief Security Officer, Facebook, Inc., Action Alliance Executive Committee member, and co-lead of the Public Awareness and Education Task Force

For many people the topic of suicide is hard to open up to others about. For some it brings up feelings unspoken, and for others memories unwelcome. But the more you learn about the topic, the more you appreciate the power of communication in reducing the likelihood of suicide. Communication builds emotional connections, exposes risks, leads to understanding, and gives opportunities for intervention.

Years ago, the employees at a fledgling Facebook discovered the power of communication as a means of intervention, when young people using the service started writing in to our customer support team to report when a friend had posted a status update that could be interpreted as a sign of suicide risk. Confronted with this new type of intentional or unintentional cry for help, we realized that we needed to do two things—to engage with the expert community to learn how to best address these situations, and to use the power of Facebook itself to mobilize friends and counselors to communicate with the at risk person.

Fortunately, the suicide prevention community embraced working with the Facebook team, establishing strong relationships that have helped us mature in our handling of these situations. One key partnership has been our participation in the National Action Alliance for Suicide Prevention. I’m proud to be a co-lead of the Public Awareness and Education Task Force. We fully support the Action Alliance vision of a world free from the tragic experience of suicide, and truly benefit from the rich blend of public and private resources the Action Alliance brings to bear. The Action Alliance has shown that partnership driven solutions can offer the best help in the places where it is needed most and helped us expand our network as widely as possible to make assistance available to everyone who expresses need on our site. Through this network, we have partnered with over 25 different suicide prevention agencies across the world to provide help to all our users, using resources appropriate for wherever they may be.

With the help of these partners, we have built a number of online solutions:

· We started by working with the Action Alliance, Lifeline, and the National Council for Suicide Prevention to create content for our Help Center to help the people who use our service identify those in distress and give them the help they need. Because there is no substitute for the care and concern of a person’s friends and family, we wanted to provide the advice necessary to help this natural support network recognize and respond to risk factors.

· We built on that by creating a robust reporting structure. To help those users who may be in distress we have Report links all over the site. When you click Report you can message your friend directly using our Social Reporting tool or you can report the content to Facebook to be reviewed by our Safety Team.

· And most importantly, using dedicated staffing and relationships with organizations such as Lifeline, we have done our best to pair the user with trained suicide prevention counselors. Initially that was through email connections, but recently we implemented a new solution that has worked even better. Since December last year, those users (in the United States) in distress receive a message from Facebook containing a link to begin a confidential chat session with a crisis worker from Lifeline. We rolled out this feature in partnership with the National Action Alliance for Suicide Prevention and Surgeon General Dr. Regina Benjamin.

· Building on these positive experiences, we have worked with the National Council for Suicide Prevention and SAMSHA to bring together (twice so far) a working group with other leading internet companies to build out a set of joint best practices.

We’re proud and humbled by the role we have been able to play in this team effort, and grateful to the Action Alliance for its important role in our growth. We look forward to the future of this relationship because together we can stop suicide by helping people find the courage to speak up whenever they see the signs a friend or family member is in distress.