A very public viewing

UPDATE (Saturday, November 22, 2008, 10 p.m. HST):

The father of Abraham Biggs has put some of the blame on those who watched and did nothing.  He's quoted as saying, "It's a person's life that we're talking about; And as a human being, you don't watch someone in trouble and sit back and just watch."

His sister Rosalind Biggs offered similar sentiments. "It didn't have to be," she said. "They got hits; they got viewers; nothing happened for hours."

ORIGINAL POST:

A Florida teenager has committed suicide on camera and online. Nineteen-year-old Abraham Biggs consumed a lethal combination of opiates and benzodiazepine, a depressant used to treat insomnia. 

What prompted me to blog about this is that the case sounds disgustingly similar to social phenomena that have been occurring with greater frequency in Korea, where the suicide rate is obscenely high and authorities seem at a loss as to how to curb it. 

You see, this guy blogged about his plans to commit suicide, and nobody had tried to stop him. Then, as he was doing it, although some people on the bodybuilding website where this all went down tried to talk him out of it, others were encouraging it. 

Still a few more were "debating whether the dose he took was lethal," which I think can reasonably be chalked up to disbelief. If you've ever encountered someone who is actually trying to take their life—or at least letting you know they are thinking about it—disbelief is a common reaction. We don't want to believe it. We are at a loss for what to do when it happens. Or worse, we're afraid of embarrassing ourselves and/or the person we would want to save if it turns out the "suicide" was a sick joke or something. (When I was a teenager I had that very experience.)

In Korea, the sick thing is that so many people seem to think that those who commit suicide are "brave" because they went through with it. The idea being that they overcame their fear of death and ended whatever suffering they had. Brave. And while the public tragedy of the latest in a rash of celebrity suicides deeply saddens most people, a handful are twistedly looking to these fallen stars as role models. 

Of course, the narrative used in the West today is that such acts are cries for help or, less generously, cowardly acts of fear about facing one's troubles. The easy way out. No bravery there. 

Curbing the suicide rate in any culture is a difficult enough task without such encouragement. Now we have people who think there's some glory in going out with a bang—like a public self-execution—and the Roman circus-goers who egg them on. This has been going on in Korea online for a number of years, with the disturbing twist that some people meet on websites that are purportedly oriented toward suicide prevention, so they can either encourage each other to go through with it, or so that they can talk someone into going through with it. 

For public health specialists, this is an issue with no easy solutions. In countries like Korea, Japan, and elsewhere where people perceive so much stigma if they seek psychiatric help, getting to those people and helping them in a meaningful way is a daunting task.