Suicide by Tweeting? What to do?
What do you do when you read a tweet purporting to be a suicide note? Do you take it seriously? Do you wonder if perhaps it’s some form of creative musing? Do you DO anything?
That was my dilemma this morning, when I started reading tweets posted from within 1km radius of my location.
There is was “Personal Post: Suicide”.
My problem was, the damn thing was in the Spanish language, linking via bit.ly to a blogpost, and while I have a decent grasp of Spanish, I wouldn’t pick up on nuances suggesting it was a gag the same way as I would in English.
“27 Minutes Ago,” it said beside the tweet. I’m too late now anyway, I thought, trying to give myself comfort.
He wrote, “this is the end of the road”; “soon I’ll lose consciousness”; “I’ve just taken 146 pills”; “I’m lying on my sofa, waiting for this to happen”; “goodbye life, goodbye world”.
Great. What do I do? Phone the police? And tell them what? “No, I don’t know the guy, nor even his name”; “No, I don’t know exactly where he is”. “Yes, yes, I read this on Twitter, what’s Twitter? Oh, well, Twitter is…”
And all this in Spanish you realise, because this is happening in Barcelona. So I phone a Spanish-speaking friend to parse the blog post, the language, to assess the gravity of it. “Too busy, sorry,” she replied. I felt like a fool trying to explain the thing to her. She must think I’m mad. Shite!
What now? Check Twitter again, see if he’s still tweeting… nothing… nothing for the last 35 minutes.
Do I look-up the whois on the domain name on which the blog resides to get a phone number; do I tweet back to ask “Um, are you still alive?”; do I contact his followers; or perhaps I SHOULD call the police.
Then, suddenly, signs of life, 40 minutes after his suicide-post, he tweets again, he’s still alive, it’s nothing related, it’s a retweet, boring in its absolute normality.
What DO you do?
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Here’s his Twitter - “Post Personal: El Suicido” (February 3rd around 10am GMT). It’s an odd time to commit suicide, I thought.
Jessica
I used to keep contact with this girl on LiveJournal. She always striked me as very depressed, but she was really nice. One day she posted something similar to this. Everyone thought she was joking, but then someone who lived in the same neighborhood as she did called 911. They thought it was a prank. Turns out it wasn\’t.
It\’s quite sad but it\’s becoming very common these days. People are so lonely they don\’t even have someone to leave a goodbye letter, so they turn to the internet.