Comments on: Dealing with Suicide On Your Online Community or Forums: How You Can Help and Protect Everyone

By: ManagingCommunities.com’s Most Popular Posts of 2009 » ManagingCommunities.com

Sat, 02 Jan 2010 21:02:22 +0000

[...] Dealing with Suicide On Your Online Community or Forums: How You Can Help and Protect Everyone A guide to dealing with a difficult subject and being prepared should you be faced with [...]

By: Patrick

Patrick — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 15:45:03 +0000

Thanks for sharing that, Martin. Good link and I really appreciate it. I’m sorry that you had to deal with that situation, but am glad that this post helped in some small way.

Patrick

By: Martin Reed

Martin Reed — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 12:25:56 +0000

This actually happened recently at Female Forum and I found myself referring back to this post. Not sure if it will be helpful to you, but there is a helpline for those in the UK and Ireland who are feeling depressed or suicidal run by the Samaritans (http://www.samaritans.org/) – numbers are on their website.

By: Patrick

Patrick — Wed, 29 Jul 2009 23:24:31 +0000

Thanks for the comment, Ms. Pritchard. I appreciate you passing the article along.

Though they are more than welcome, with proper COPPA documentation, my communities tend not to have many people under 13. But, if I did have a member who was under 13 and threatened suicide, I would probably start by notifying the guardian that we had on file. If that was unsuccessful, I would attempt to do what I outlined here in this article.

For people 13-17, I would go ahead with what I outlined here. Of course, if you require guardianship information from people of these ages, as well, I’d certainly use that information, too.

I hope that this helps and I hope that others have some thoughts. Thanks for asking us to think about it.

Sincerely,

Patrick

By: Amy Pritchard

Amy Pritchard — Tue, 28 Jul 2009 22:40:02 +0000

Just retweeted this again today, as we are trying to formulate policy on dealing with this situation as pertaining to minor children. Any readers’ (or author’s) thoughts on the subject would be much appreciated!

By: Patrick

Patrick — Mon, 13 Jul 2009 13:24:09 +0000

Thanks for the kind words, Mr. Hemmer.

By: Martin Hemmer

Martin Hemmer — Sun, 12 Jul 2009 01:49:10 +0000

Very useful information. Thanks for this. You got a great blog .I will be interested in more similar topics.

By: Kevin

Kevin — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 08:36:08 +0000

Suicide posts, are a very scary thought, both in the online world and off-line world, I can say I did experience this once. One of our members had made a suicide post, and said he was ending his life, luckily he didn’t do it… but its still quite a scary thing to deal with for everyone involved.

-Kevin

By: Patrick

Patrick — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 15:12:04 +0000

Thanks for saying so, Wendy. I really appreciate it.

Patrick

By: Wendy

Wendy — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 14:47:40 +0000

Thank you, Patrick, for this thoughtful and practical guide.