thelastpsychiatrist.com - British Medical Journal Sends Its Scienticians To The Internet. Adnotated.

And finds that "Suicide searches produce disturbing, unsurprising results."ⁱ

Damn the internet, damn it and its tubes.

I'm not sure if I should get angry or laugh. BMJ. Not Weekly Reader. BMJ.

An article in BMJⁱⁱ tries to determine how much information about suicide is online, and whether the sites are pro or anti suicide. They searched the internetⁱⁱⁱ, and found:

Altogether 240 different sites were identified. Just under a fifth of hits (90) were for dedicated suicide sites. Half of these were judged to be encouraging, promoting, or facilitating suicide; 43 contained personal or other accounts of suicide methods, providing information and discussing pros and cons but without direct encouragement; and two sites portrayed suicide or self harm in fashionable terms...

Or, as the news articles about this study say:

But perhaps most disturbing was that the most frequent results were pro-suicide. "The three most frequently occurring sites were all pro-suicide," note the authors, who also found that "Wikipedia was the fourth most frequently occurring site." [emphasis mine.]

So I guess the internet is awash in suicidophilia. Or maybe BMJ doesn't know how to use Google?^iv

The [search] terms used were: (a) suicide; (b) suicide methods; (c) suicide sure methods; (d) most effective methods of suicide; (e) methods of suicide; (f) ways to commit suicide; (g) how to commit suicide; (h) how to kill yourself; (i) easy suicide methods; (j) best suicide methods; (k) pain-free suicide, and (l) quick suicide.

"Damn it! I typed in "naked porn stars" and all I got back was naked pornstars! What the hell is wrong with this thing?"^v

Try searching "suicide prevention." Ok, see? Can we all go back to worrying about illegal music downloads?

^vi

1. I'm not going to permit his own links anymore, the yarvin problem is getting out of hand. In the original case it was just some "clever" pantsuit "cleverly" linking obscure pantsuit resources while quietly avoiding "toxic" aka non-pantsuit resources. In this case however, the dude's laser-focused on linking a) tendrils of the USG.Pravda and b) tendrils of the USG.Academia, to the exclusion of all else. Neither of these being particularly real (as proven inter alia by the fact that the links don't even work 90% of the time and are universally junk when they do), I really don't feel like puting out however many thousand links. Let them rot on their own, what.

   I'm just going to preserve the body in a footnote. Like so : arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20080411-suicide-searches-produce-disturbing-unsurprising-results.html. If you're actually interested, go ahead and copy/paste it -- though I bet you it won't be worth your time. [↩]

2. bmj.com/cgi/content/full/336/7648/800 [↩]
3. No, they asked google. There is a huge difference. [↩]
4. Oh, there's a skill to using the deskilling interface ? Do tell me more.

   Anyone noticed they went from 1k results to 100 ? Anyone noticed they silently dropped all the search operators ? Anyone notice anything at all ? [↩]

5. They're pantsuits ; they actually imagine the self-secreted indirection layers keeping them dumb and castrated are physical reality. [↩]
6. Yup, the original includes an empty blockquote here, as the last element of the article (followed by a half dozen empty lines). Nfi. [↩]