Internet suicide: Communities of affirmation and the lethality of communication

Internet identity

The permissiveness of the Internet is clearest in the message boards, forums, and chat rooms constructed around ideas and practices that are not accepted in any wider society. Here we can readily find obsessions that coalesce into group identities, supported by the unique capacity of the Web to create multiuser spaces that invite and facilitate the formation of close-knit communities (Manovich, 2001, p. 258). One feature that many of these communities share is rejection of professional intervention aimed at healing participants of a definitive core quality, something that they express as being essential to their identity, things like drug addiction, anorexia, self-mutilation, and obsession with suicide. For some Internet users, their online community can readily become a vehicle by which they reject unwanted judgment and intervention in their lives, all the while making use of the Web’s powerful capacity for posting enabling information.

These qualities of Internet communication have made suicide forums in particular a focus of both professional and popular concern. A thematic focal point of suicide in instant interactive mass communication was already available to the computer savvy a few years before the advent of the Internet. Starting in 1990, the pre-Internet Usenet platform hosted the first nonmoderated suicide newsgroup, alt.suicide.holiday (a.s.h.). ¹ Beginning as a threaded discussion of the possible connections between suicide and holiday seasons, the group soon moved on to the expression of a wide range of opinions, from “prolife” to (more commonly) “prochoice,” the construction of a “methods file,” and the formation of a community of regular participants who identified themselves as “ashers.” Several suicides committed by regular alt.suicide.holiday participants provoked media attention and controversy, including that of a 20-year-old Norwegian man who used the newsgroup to find a suicide partner, a 17-year-old Austrian girl, to jump with him from Norway’s 1,900 foot Pulpit Rock. Then the self-inflicted death of 19-year-old Suzie Gonzales—who, carefully following information made available through the newsgroup, posed as a jeweller to obtain a lethal dose of potassium cyanide and then self-administered a carefully measured dose of the poison in a Tallahassee hotel, with her death announced to police, family and friends via a time-delayed e-mail message—prompted media coverage critical of the newsgroup’s methods file and “prochoice” advocacy. An article in the San Francisco Chronicle (Scherees, 2003, p. 1), for example, expressed the view that Suzie Gonzales’s newsgroup encouraged suicide in the context of “hopeless rants about life’s miseries, advertisements for suicide partners, and requests for feedback on self-murder plans.”

Little has changed since the advent of the Usenet community, except that with the expanded use of the Internet the subject of suicide has become more easily accessible than ever before, as any Internet search of any aspect of the topic will clearly demonstrate. At the time of writing, for example, a Google search using the keywords “suicide methods” produced 43,000,000 results; and online discussion groups are simply too numerous—and often too hidden—to even begin to quantify. ² Suicide forums tend to be rigorous, rational, and instrumentally effective when it comes to exchanging information on the techniques of self-inflicted death, including nicotine poisoning, helium asphyxiation, carbon monoxide poisoning, the effects of (and underground sources for) phenobarbital, and mental coaching techniques for overcoming instinctive inhibitions against falling. Moreover, discussion groups that profess to be “open” often incline toward the negation of life and affirmation of the positive value of self-inflicted death.

This immediately introduces a basic question concerning the potential consequences of online identity based on self-destruction for the actual manifestation of self-destructive behaviour. The seemingly limitless potential of the Internet to carry more information to more people raises the spectre that some, possibly many, forums might encourage vulnerable individuals to act on inclinations toward self-destruction. As the prominent suicides associated with alt.suicide.holiday suggest, there could well be an aggravated “cohort effect” that occurs when depressed or otherwise desperate individuals, who may once have been socially isolated, find others in online communities that share suicide-oriented information and motivation. Does the Internet influence suicide through provocation and encouragement to act? Or is there a preventive effect that accompanies new venues for communication and belonging? Alternatively, might there be an “and/or” quality to this last question, in which consequences differ according to the life conditions and inclinations of individuals and perhaps entire societies?

This paper examines the literature and online discourse to explore the possibility that the Internet facilitates a normalization of suicide, and if so whether and under what circumstances it might encourage or provoke, and/or discourage and hedge against acts of self-destruction. In addressing this question, I also consider in a more general way some of the new and emerging conditions for the formation of online communities and identities. These two objectives are closely related: one cannot properly understand the particular nature of Internet suicide without considering the wider context of online identity formation in which it is situated.

Routes of exposure and the cohort effect

If we accept the notion that ideas and images of suicide are a significant element in lethality, then certainly the ready access to information on effective strategies for self-inflicted death would be expected to have an influence on acts of suicide. We would expect that in an online community where the formation of group identity develops around the heroic value of suicide, particularly those in which a self-inflicted death is openly discussed as a “success,” there would be a greater willingness to act on inclinations toward self-destruction, possibly in pursuit of group acceptance and inclusion. We know that some of the Internet sites where participants share information on methods and express acceptance of suicide as a moral good or even a civil right do at times encourage individuals or groups of individuals toward acts of suicide. It is less clear whether this marks the beginning of a trend that has yet to fully manifest itself. Can we find in online communities new and emerging ways by which ideas are connected to acts of suicide?

A growing number of researchers are arguing that the “routes of exposure,” the channels by which ideas associated with suicide become normalized and more readily acted upon, should be seen as a significant part of suicidal behaviour (Gould, Wallenstein, & Davidson, 1989; Kral, 1994, 1998). The main thrust of this line of inquiry is that the decision of individuals to commit suicide is “a culturally situated concept that becomes part of an individual’s repertoire of choices” (Kral & Dyck, 1995, p. 201).

The fundamental link between communication of ideas and suicide calls into question the widely prevalent and durable Durkheimian emphasis on social integration and moral regulation as the only significant variables by which a society’s suicide rates can be understood. For Durkheim in his 1897 book Le Suicide, the act of suicide was a litmus test for the problem of social cohesion; it revealed the regularities and laws through which societies are formed by indicating the consequences of extremes in cohesion and regulation, each predictably reflected, he argued, in high rates of suicide. Durkheim was famously dismissive of efforts to go beyond the social forces of cohesion and regulation in his approach to suicide; and his views remained unchallenged by any plausible alternative through most of the 20th century (Joiner, 2005, pp. 33–35). His dismissiveness included resistance to the observation that communication was undeniably involved in the choice of method, and hence of lethality, which in turn would have clear consequences for rates of suicide. His solution to the problem of regularities in the method of suicide was simply to emphasize an “affinity” between the method chosen and the social cause, reverting to the overarching influence of basic conditions of social integration and regulation to explain both suicide rates and the “scenography,” the mood and motive of the act of suicide (which he considered to be epiphenomenal); he was never tempted to do a thoroughgoing analysis of the connection between suicide rates and methods (Gane, 2005).

A communication-based approach to the study of suicide, by contrast, points to the reach of ideas shared with others as having an independent influence on individuals who are already predisposed toward suicide. It begins with acts and processes of communication and interactive or collaborative identity formation and moves on to consider how ideas and networks of interaction can influence patterns of suicide. The direct or indirect communication of values that make suicide noteworthy, acceptable, or even heroic, is every bit as important in understanding lethality as is the precipitating crisis, the background of depression, failure, burdensomeness, and isolation that may have contributed to an individual’s decision to take his or her own life (Kral, 1994, p. 245).

The influence of ideas on lethality can be seen clearly in the phenomena associated with “imitation” or “emulation.” An imitative effect in suicide became widely accepted by suicide researchers in the 1980s with a compelling body of correlations established between suicides publicized in media and increased frequencies of suicides in the regions covered by the publicity (e.g., Phillips, 1982; Schmidtke & Häfner, 1988). Though there continues to be debate and ongoing research surrounding the causes of these imitative suicides, the correlation itself was sufficiently consistent to have widely influenced journalistic standards in media coverage of suicides.

Concentrated episodes of self-destruction have also been found to occur within relatively closed communities such as school campuses, prisons, barracks, or aboriginal villages. These are forms of imitative suicide that in their very nature embody a contradiction that has been inherent in the sociological study of suicide from its beginnings in France in the late 19th century. A defining quality of these “clusters” is a paradox in which those who take their own lives are driven by a profound sense of social isolation and loneliness, yet act to end their suffering in ways closely resembling the suicidal acts of others, often in the same social milieu, demonstrating “a linkage between individuals, a true group or collective behavior beyond the society’s norms” (Coleman, 1987, p. 3). I first encountered the influence of a cohort effect on self-destructive behaviour in 1999 during my work as an ethnographer in the northern Canadian aboriginal community of Cross Lake (Niezen, 2009). The intense concentration of self-destructive behaviour in this reservation village, it seemed to me, could not be understood without taking into consideration the powerful influence that an age group or cohort was having in normalizing the idea of suicide, and in providing examples of suicidal acts for others to witness—and even to follow. This made it possible to develop the connection between routes of exposure and the lethality of self-destruction by pointing to a situation in which suicidal individuals were finding a sense of belonging with other suicidal people, in some instances acting on their decision to die in communication—and in a broad sense even in community—with others.

This conclusion applies directly to efforts to understand the potential impacts of digital media on suicidal behaviour. Shifting the focus from perturbation to communication in accounting for collective patterns of self-destruction, while raising the possibility of the formation of suicidal cohorts or communities, would give the new phenomena of Internet forums dedicated to suicide a privileged place as a possible cause of acts of self-destruction.

Some of the strongest evidence that this influence is in fact occurring can be found in studies of youth suicide in Japan. Before the late 1990s, Japan had a fairly high, but not extraordinary suicide rate (around 18 or 19 per 100,000) (Takahashi, Hirasawa, Koyama, Senzaki, & Senzaki, 1998). The annual national frequency increased dramatically in 1998 (rising suddenly to 26.0) against a backdrop of economic recession and increased unemployment, and has remained around this level to the present (24.2 in 2005 and 24.6 in 2009). As a prelude to seeking an explanation for this increase in frequency, Naito (2007, p. 587) adds two cultural factors to the discussion: (a) the culturally iconic approach to suicide as an honourable way to respond to defeat; and (b) the reluctance of the Japanese to seek professional help for mental illness, often choosing instead to suffer in isolation. Her study also examines a trend in Japanese suicide that is genuinely unprecedented: youth suicide is sharply on the rise, as indicated by the statistics for 2003, in which, of the more than 30,000 victims, 613 were under 20 years of age, an increase of 111 over the previous year (Naito, 2007, p. 584). Youth suicide in Japan has also changed qualitatively. The most basic transformation is one from solitary suicide ideation and acts of suicide to the expression of negative feelings with like-minded people over the Internet, while occasionally finding companions with whom to die (Naito, 2007, p. 591). Ozawa de-Silva (2008, 2010) adds to the reason for concern over this recent trend with her convincing analysis of the distinctiveness of the connections between social suffering and suicide in Japan, including an element of cultural continuity in the decision to die through online suicide pacts: “The decision of the Group… becomes something that [suicidal individuals] can follow—are indeed obligated, according to cultural prescriptions, to follow; social obligation is thereby reconciled to individual choice” (Ozawa de-Silva, 2008, p. 546).

At the same time, Naito (2007) argues that traditional suicide pacts are fundamentally different from what she terms “Net suicide” in that the pacts occur among groups of friends who know one another personally, whereas Net suicides occur among strangers who make arrangements online for ending their lives together at a predetermined location. In 2004, a year in which 32,325 suicides were recorded in Japan, some 60 people (the figure may be inexact because of forensic uncertainties) ended their lives through such online arrangements. While Naito is justified in pointing to the recent influence of online relationships on youth suicides as a “worrying trend,” the low figures associated with Net suicide relative to the total number of suicides suggest that the news media—ever drawn to unusual and sensational deaths—have had an effect in exaggerating the significance of this phenomenon. It remains to be seen whether concerns about Net suicide as an emerging trend, including concerns about its possible spread from Japan and South Korea to other parts of the world, are warranted.

Meanwhile, the findings from Japan suggest a problem that is somewhat less grim: Given conditions of high Internet use and growing frequencies of youth suicide in Japan, why are the figures specifically for Net suicide so low? There is a syllogistic way to broaden this question: Given the literature that offers convincing evidence that communication of suicide can have lethal effects, and given the burgeoning amount of information and discourse on suicide available on the Net, why do we not find many more instances than we do of Internet communication having a demonstrable influence on acts of self-destruction? Why is the evidence not more compelling? A prevalent (though usually implicit) explanation for this observation, to which I now turn, is the affirmative, ameliorative qualities of online therapies which are seen by some researchers to act preventively against suicide—not just by addressing the despair of individuals but equally by acting against the dark influence of Internet-based suicide advocacy.

A Manichean dualism

There is a Manichean quality—a struggle of death against life, cultivated despair against rediscovered purpose, pathology versus well-being—in some general accounts of Internet suicide forums. Since no one is able to accurately measure the impact of the Internet on suicide rates (at least not beyond the indirect observation that frequencies have not significantly altered on a global scale in parallel with increasing Internet use) analyses usually resort to description of the various countervailing pressures that impel those who are at risk of suicide in one direction or another. Articles on the impact of the Internet on suicide typically contrast forums that provide information on methods of suicide and that advocate and celebrate acts of suicide with forums that provide support, counterinformation, and online counselling using methods of intervention recognized by professional consensus. A study conducted among Japanese adolescents, for example, makes a connection between suicide ideation and histories of searching the Internet for suicide-related topics. The authors then recommend as a preventive action the creation of antisuicide web sites, which would ideally lead adolescents considering suicide or self-injury to sources of help (Katsumata, Matsumoto, Kitani, & Takeshima, 2008, p. 746). Some clinicians point out that in addition to its widely recognized negative effects, the Internet has potential uses in suicide intervention, including ready recognition of the at-risk individual and follow-up efforts to prevent suicide and support survivors, with chat rooms and email exchange taking the place of telephone outreach and/or help lines (Haas et al., 2008; Tam, Tang, & Fernando, 2007). The charity organization The Samaritan, for example, receives about 50,000 emails from suicidal patients and their relatives each year (Alao, Soderberg, Pohl, & Alao, 2006, p. 490). Some therapists argue there are advantages to therapy via email communication, which would tend to attract those same computer users who are finding (and losing themselves in) less life-affirming identity attachments on the Internet. Alao and coauthors speculate that:

The use of written communication may be acceptable to individuals who have lack of trust, those who fear being labeled, and some patients with paranoid ideations or delusions. Computer mediated counseling may thus protect anonymity, decrease self-awareness [and] avoid stereotypes. (2006, p. 490)

This dualism is somewhat complicated by the finding that not all efforts to intervene through online therapy are equally effective. A study of 52 English language suicide prevention web sites gathered through an Australian Google search, for example, found that feedback to web site administrators on intervention techniques based on professional consensus did not generally lead to notable improvement in suicide intervention techniques (Jorm, Fischer, & Oh, 2010). The authors of this study speculate that there may be common structural failures of communication between technicians receiving feedback and administrators who are more qualified to revise web site content. This could well be true, but it is equally likely that suicide sites are among the most recent venues for charlatanism, for marketing methods (or books about methods) that have no grounding in professional therapeutic research or practice.

Notwithstanding the limitations of current research, studies of Internet suicide justifiably emphasize the usefulness of support groups and other forms of online intervention. This can involve creating a counternarrative to the online promotion of suicide through the construction of rival alternatives. If there are sites promoting the idea of suicide and even encouraging their participants toward acts of self-destruction, while remaining adamantly closed to counterpersuasion, then the best way to proceed therapeutically is to establish sites that offer counselling and support while promoting positive, life-affirming values.

It is easy to agree that overall there is significant value and equally significant unrealized potential in sites dedicated to online therapy. But the Manichean dualism in Internet suicide research that sets the influence of effective online therapy against suicide advocacy is based on an unrealistic understanding of the actual values, discourse, and consequences for behaviour of a great many suicide-oriented sites. Besides the unevenness of the quality of online therapy, the dualism is further complicated by the possibility of a paradoxical ameliorative effect produced by the acceptance of suicide—even suicide advocacy—in the context of a supportive online community. There will always be those situations in online communities in which pressures toward conformity and singleness of purpose in suicide advocacy can influence vulnerable individuals toward taking their own lives. But this still leaves us with the common experience, evident in the narratives of current and former participants, of finding solace and renewed attachment to life through immersion in online communities dedicated to open discussion of self-inflicted death, including, paradoxically, the methods by which it might be acted on.

Many suicide forums are based, explicitly or implicitly, on a premise of acceptance of a quality of personality—dissatisfaction with life, alienation from others, and persistent thoughts and/or behaviour toward self-inflicted death—that are rejected by those around them. Taking part in a preferred site or in a network of related forums, participants discover that they are not alone, but have a great deal in common with a community of online peers. In this affirmative quality many suicide forums share similarities with a wider range of sites based on a variety of socially rejected inclinations, obsessions, and life choices. I have chosen to refer to these forums as communities of affirmation to emphasize the potentially life-changing realization by marginalized individuals that their socially isolating obsessions are in fact shared with others, that through access to the Internet they have a way to belong, to be human in a distinct way in society with others.

Communities of affirmation

Among the proliferation of Web-based communities are those that attempt to normalize or promote life choices widely seen as pathological. ³ Extreme opinions can be formed by separating a group from the rest of society while sharply curtailing a group’s access to information, leaving opinion to converge narrowly within enclaves of loyalty or shared delusion (Sunstein, 2009). In keeping with this observation, Internet identities are facilitated in part by effective enclosure and resistance to information seen to be at variance with core values. To begin with, the simple act of constructing a personal “profile” allows Web users to include what they accept and exclude what they reject, a process of selectivity that, according to Sunstein, encourages radicalization of opinion, “as like-minded people sort themselves into virtual communities that seem comfortable and comforting” (2006, p. 97).

The communities that form through the Web’s encouragement of creativity and choice include those based on seemingly innocent descents into fantasy, like sites whose participants see themselves as vampires, while drawing distinctions between “blood-drinkers,” “energy vampires,” and “Vampyre lifestylers,” all of whom are welcome to participate; or sites whose participants refer to themselves as Otherkin, whose inner essence is considered to be other than human, something like a totem, whether it be an animal or (more commonly) something or someone with special powers like an elf or a dragon. ⁴ Such online imaginings in support of identity affirmations and role playing do not have to be quite so picturesque, but can include the simple indulgence in alternative ways of being human. Without his Internet community, for example, Stanley, a self-avowed “infantalist” featured by National Geographic, would not likely find others whose lifestyle choice centred on coming home from work and changing into “baby mode,” passively having his every need attended to by a partner while dressing and behaving as an infant (National Geographic Features Adult Babies, n.d.).

Then there are those more disturbing sites based on various forms of self-harm and self-destruction such as self-mutilation (Adler & Adler, 2008), bulimia, anorexia (sometimes referred to as “pro-ana”), and morbid obesity facilitated by “feeders” (with pro-obesity sites blending seamlessly with fetishism and pornography). Here we see a close similarity to sites based on the positive value of suicide, except that on these sites the form of self-destruction chosen as the focal point of collective identity is not oriented toward the final, irrevocable end of life.

Other Internet communities are based on rare pathologies, including a form of body integrity identity disorder (or BIID), sometimes also called “amputee disorder,” in which sufferers are obsessed with the amputation of a healthy limb (Braam, Visser, Cath, & Hoogendijk, 2006; First, 2005; Ryan, 2009); as well as communities formed around other manifestations of BIID, or “body dysmorphic disorder,” in which otherwise healthy individuals base their “authentic selves” on the desire to be paralyzed, blind, or deaf (Ryan, 2009). Perhaps the most disturbing of these communities is that which is dedicated to promoting the spread of HIV/AIDS, with the obsessed individuals who seek infection referred to as “bug chasers” (Gauthier & Forsyth, 1999). Participants in such forums are, as one dismayed bioethicist notes, defending their right to wear and live by their labels, producing a new force in the social production of madness and greatly complicating the task of therapy (Charland, 2004, p. 336).

The community of affirmation that seems to have gone the furthest toward consolidating its member’s identities through online interaction is based on the self-diagnosis of Asperger’s syndrome, a developmental disorder, which participants in “Aspie” sites situate on a continuum with the professionally recognized diagnosis of autism. This community manifests itself through several interconnected sites, including one, “Aspies for Freedom,” that, as the title suggests, claims a legal identity, with the following “welcome” statement posted on the opening page:

We know that autism is not a disease, and we oppose any attempts to ‘cure’ someone of an autism spectrum condition, or any attempts to make them ‘normal’ against their will. We are part of building the autism culture. We aim to strengthen autism rights, oppose all forms of discrimination against aspies and auties, and work to bring the community together both online and offline. (Welcome to AFF, n.d.)

While not every community of affirmation goes as far as the “Aspies” in constructing a boundary of inclusion and exclusion, they do have in common the establishment of regimes for patrolling the content of their sites, primarily in an effort to protect their contributing members from abuse or “trolling” (of which more immediately below) from unwelcome, uncommitted participants. This means that communities of affirmation provide a closed space for the exchange of ideas and formation of solidarity that is quite distinct from other forms of recognition and acceptance (or negation) that might be found elsewhere on the Net. Web browsers might encounter a range of reactions from an anonymous public if they were to reveal their self-defining obsessions in an open forum: from rejection, ridicule, and “cyber-bullying” to recognition, understanding, and support. But open forums differ in significant ways from carefully monitored bulletin boards, discussion groups, and chat rooms of sites that announce themselves as having minimum standards of acceptance of particular ideas and/or identities as a condition of participation.

While it would be reasonable to expect recognition, acceptance, and affirmation to be progressively more involved forms of engagement, reflecting an almost natural range of public opinion in an online interaction or community, there is usually in fact a divide constructed in sites hosted by communities of affirmation that separates the committed from those who would reject them—or worse, who would ridicule and goad them from the Internet’s cover of anonymity. Trolling, a form of Internet behaviour that involves posting inflammatory or off-topic messages in online communities with a view to provoking emotional responses, is relevant for our understanding of Net-based provocations of suicide. More broadly, trolling has had a formative influence on the dynamics of online discourse and on the forms, particularly the degrees of enclosure, of online communities. The widely known injunction “do not feed the trolls,” is often taken further than the mere avoidance of any kind of response to provocation, through the cultivation of core communities of regular participants who shelter themselves from mockery with rules of participation enforced by administrators and (because exposure to trolling is almost inevitable) who protect themselves from its emotional effects with heightened collective expressions of support.

A review of the introductory pages of such sites makes it clear that the central objective behind their insistence on enclosure is to protect their core constituencies—those whose marginal identities correspond with the central criteria of inclusion and participation in the site. The sites make it clear that they will not permit negative comments, rejection, and bullying from the noncommitted. The self-injury site, “SIFriends,” for example, posts on its welcome page a mission statement that aptly expresses the combined goals of protection from hostile intruders and support for members:

[Our mission is] [t]o Provide [sic] a worldwide online community to help people male and female, young and old whose lives are personally effected [sic] by SI (self injury/self harm). To offer a friendly place where people with a similar condition can get together and openly discuss the issues, struggles, joys and challenges that they meet and contend with daily in their lives. To give people who self harm a community where they will not be ashamed, afraid, judged, insulted or viewed as strange or different because of who they are and the behaviours they exhibit. To offer a forum where there is support, hope, compassion, empathy and comfort for those individuals around the world who intentionally injure themselves whether their condition has been professionally diagnosed or not. To provide an atmosphere that is clean and friendly for people of any gender, nationality, race and age group that lives [sic] a life of injuring themselves. This is SIFriends. Welcome. (SIFriends Mission Statement, n.d.) ⁵

The result is that the Internet operates in ways that are entirely consistent with the central paradox of globalizing modernity: untrammelled, global forms of expression encourage and facilitate the erection of boundaries and the enclosure of communities. This can be seen most clearly in the effort of some communities of affirmation to create a “culture” through identification of core beliefs and recruitment of adherents. This strategically oriented aspect of online community formation is illustrated in the statement of purpose posted by the vampire web site, “Sanguinarius,” in which its core members are called upon to “increase communication and understanding among and concerning blood-drinkers, psi/energy vampires, and Vampyre lifestylers; as well as to work toward unification into a cohesive culture” and, further, “[t]o develop outreach and a system of support for those estranged from the vampiric community” (Statement of Purpose, n.d.). The idea of a deep, permanent inner essence as the foundation and core criterion of inclusion in group identity is again expressed most explicitly by those who refer to themselves as Aspies, but who see the essence of who they are in autism:

Being autistic is something that influences every single element of who a person is—from the interests we have, the ethical systems we use, the way we view the world, and the way we live our lives. As such, autism is a part of who we are. To “cure” someone of autism would be to take away the person they are, and replace them with someone else. (Welcome to AFF, n.d.)

The extreme ideologies of many Internet sites begin quite simply with the technology’s remarkable capacity for small-scale censorship, which in turn enables enclosure into communities that validate the ideas and identities of those who would otherwise be forced into privacy or social exclusion. These communities protect their members from the Kantian injunction that freedom of speech carries with it a corresponding obligation to listen to those who might disagree. Communities of affirmation have at their disposal a technology of communication that allows them to avoid answerability for their opinions, identity choices, and life commitments (see Bell, 2007). Such sites make themselves havens of affirmation by articulating a core ideology, often based on the positive “rebellious” aspects of marginality and delusion, and then setting about to excoriate anything that might pose a threat to its integrity.

Persistence, provocation, and links to behaviour

The most important distinctions we can draw between various kinds of online communities should begin with the extent to which they cultivate durable commitments from their members and, following from this, the extent to which they provoke or pressure their members to act in conformity with common values. Situating suicide forums within this range of influence may give us some idea of the extent to which toxic forms of behaviour are actively encouraged online and what kind of community, with what forms of protective enclosure, makes such forms of conformity possible.

Even in the absence of comparative research on the durability of commitments to online groups, we can speculate that there is a spectrum in the degree of their permanence of membership. At one end of the spectrum there could be a temporary “new hat” quality to identity choices based on fantasy. Participants do profess enthusiasm for and commitment to their online community, but we can speculate that long-term membership would tend to be unstable as participants are able to come and go anonymously and without consequence. This likely would follow from several general qualities of Internet sociability: the tendency to cultivate friendships based on narrowly defined realms of experience that are open and expressive, while facilitating change of commitment without consequence. The way the effects of finding a community of affirmation are described by participants sometimes sounds like a “born again” religious experience; but there is no corresponding language of apostasy when people leave their groups.

But on the other end of the spectrum the pathologies that bring people together seem to provide a sense of community that would otherwise be absent from participants’ lives, while the pathologies themselves would tend to remain. Where affirmation is based on an ineradicable infirmity or intractable obsession there will be less of a tendency toward “forum shopping.” Online identities will tend to be stable (recall the “Aspies” and their dating site) even though individuals may surf widely and participate in multiple chat rooms.

Perhaps the most troubling aspect of the ready communication of ideas about suicide—which follows from the effective resistance to competing values, and the facility with which identity formation takes place around it—is the possibility that this enclosure and isolation based on self-destruction might well have an influence on the behaviour of those who find a sense of belonging in these sites. This has significant implications for the work of those who emphasize the communication of ideas in the social dynamics of suicide, which could ultimately lead to acts of suicide. To what extent (and in what way) might acceptance of the label “suicidal” lead to conformist behaviour associated with it? Here the similarity between other communities of affirmation based on mental illness diagnoses and those based on suicide may differ. Active participation in proanorexia, pro-obesity, or “transabled” sites, and many others based on medical terminology, presupposes that identities are firmly connected to the central diagnostic category, whereas suicide forums call for less biologically inscribed identity and appear more commonly to have porous boundaries, even while providing members with a sense of belonging and acceptance.

The exceptions to this situation of flux are important in that they point to two of the very different (and in the literature undifferentiated) possible ways that Internet discourse might further incline vulnerable individuals toward acts of suicide. Sites that do not create a defended corporate identity may not be protecting vulnerable individuals from provocation; and some of the most dangerous sites may therefore be those that do not have adequate protective barriers and support for participants. Under circumstances in which suicide forums are unmoderated and there is no barrier or compassionate response to trolling, anonymous provocations can deepen an individual’s already acute sense of worthlessness and social isolation and convince them all the more to act on their felt need to die. Alt.suicide.holiday was such a nonmoderated forum; and a side effect of its openness (which its members valued highly) was the manifestation of a high volume of trolling (which its members did not). It is of course not normally possible to determine what part, if any, the provocations of trolls might have had in the suicides that are traceable to particular forums, but common sense (not to mention professional therapeutic experience) would dictate that an incitement toward self-inflicted death through anonymous online discourse might incline the recipient/victim more than ever before toward feeling poignantly rejected and alone and willing to take his or her own life.

Considering suicide forums as potential spaces for communities of affirmation raises another possible source for lethal communication: those forums in which enclosure is taken as far as possible in the direction of conformity built around the positive value of death. In extreme (highly publicized) cases this can create space for those who, driven by “the thrill of the chase,” try to provoke vulnerable individuals to end their lives. In May 2011, for example, William Melchert-Dinkel of Minnesota was sentenced to 360 days in prison for his part in the suicides of an English man and a Canadian woman. The evidence presented by the prosecution revealed that he had communicated with up to 20 people in suicide chat rooms, in which he occasionally posed as a female nurse (he had a nursing background) and in other instances entered into suicide pacts, which he never intended to fulfill (Pilkington, 2011). Such criminality can only find a foothold in communities that are already inclined toward the formation of cohorts through closed, carefully patrolled discussion forums. The provocation to act can become acute in communities that enclose themselves within a narrow range of consensually accepted ideas, including discussion of former members’ suicides as markers of personal achievement. It is true, and a true source of concern, that the Internet has a unique potential to facilitate this kind of cohort effect.

Such provocations to act, however, appear to be uncommon and certainly do not complete the inventory of those suicide-oriented web sites—or their effects on participants—that reject professional intervention. Contrary to the oft-assumed direct correspondence between suicide advocacy forums and the increased occurrence of suicide, such forums can act paradoxically as hedges against self-destructive behaviour. Statements given by participants indicate that those who are seeking an end to personal suffering, often resulting from or manifested in social isolation, find community with others experiencing similar feelings, seeking a similar solution in the end of life. Part of the appeal of Internet forums derives from the euphoria of unexpectedly finding a network-based community that understands and even approves of ideas and feelings that are marginal and socially rejected, and which would almost never be affirmed in one’s face-to-face relationships and interactions. The testimony of a former administrator of a suicide advocacy site provides an example:

[By exploring the Web I was able] to finally find a way through life, to get help, to find friends that I wouldn’t otherwise have. I got to know people then who seemed to understand me. All of a sudden I felt as though I belonged to something and that I was approved of. Yeah, and then I thought, wait, this is helping me. And I went through a kind of euphoric phase, where I thought that this forum was really doing me good. (Prass, 2002, p. 50) ⁶

A sense of belonging in an online community, however shallow and contingent it might be, finds expression in shared ideals and an ease with which self-revelation can take place and feelings can be expressed. This is supported by Adler and Adler’s (2008, p. 34) finding in a study of self-injury web sites, to the effect that a transition has recently taken place in which those who were once “‘loners,’ bereft of the subcultural support, knowledge, and interaction with others who live on the margins” are now more readily forming “cyber subcultures that transform face-to-face (FTF) loner deviants into cyber ‘colleagues’” encountered through the anonymous intimacy of cyberspace.

This quality of communities of affirmation directly replicates a common experience of participants in group therapy: the realization by patients that they are not alone with their struggle, but are part of a group for the very reason that others are just like them (Bieling, McCabe, & Antony, 2006, p. 27). Yalom and Leszcz (2005) refer to this as “universality,” meaning that patients often come to a profound realization early in their therapy that their social isolation and sense of uniqueness are unfounded, that others—potentially many others besides those in the group—share their feelings. While we might be led to question the appropriateness of the term universality for some of the bizarre obsessions revealed and facilitated online, their basic point is incontrovertible. In the early stages of group therapy, the disconfirmation of a sense of loneliness through validation from other clients can be a life-changing event: “After hearing other members disclose concerns similar to their own, clients report feeling more in touch with the world and describe the process as a ‘welcome to the human race’ experience” (Yalom & Leszcz, 2005, p. 6). This finding from group psychotherapy complicates the dualism that separates online therapy from prosuicide sites. Those arguing for the benefits of sites based on professional intervention may be overlooking a paradox in which open, anonymous discussion of suicide in so-called prosuicide sites may act as a hedge against acts of suicide. The mere recognition, and hence validation, of pain in an online community can in itself be a model of group therapy in which anonymity encourages openness and intimacy.

Conclusion

The Internet does indeed facilitate a normalization of suicide, but at the same time many of the communities that form on the Internet also promote a normalization and validation of the obsessions and loneliness that lead people in the direction of self-destruction. This means that the stark dichotomy between “open” and therapeutic sites is misleading; and there is room to reconsider the ideas of imitation, contagion, and the cohort effect with regard to the consequences of Web-based communities. Interaction that is honest and affect-laden occurs more readily online than in “real world” settings, with particularly heightened effects, positive or negative, for lonely, isolated individuals. At the same time, the Internet is a venue for sources of identity that are simultaneously life-changing and shallow, to which members escape more often through a wider search for meaning than through self-destruction for the approval of a community of strangers.

Exploring the broad category of communities of affirmation gives us insight into the unique potential for the Internet to support the creation of groups that explicitly offer acceptance, even celebration, of otherwise socially isolating pathologies. There are two aspects of these communities that complicate the dualism that separates suicide advocacy from therapy (even while I present them in the form of an alternative dualism). First, the sources of harm, the provocations toward self-inflicted death, may not be straightforwardly attributable to the ideas and information exchanged on “open” sites. Also to be considered are the full implications of provocations that come from outside, above all the effect of trolling in aggravating tendencies toward enclosure and restricted ranges of opinion, in some (often highly publicized) cases leading to the heightened social pressures behind suicide pacts and clusters.

At the same time, communities of affirmation, including those oriented toward suicide, replicate one of the common experiences of group therapy, in which patients discover early on that “there is no human deed or thought that lies fully outside the experience of other people” (Yalom & Leszcz, 2005, p. 6) and that as individuals they are not uniquely flawed or unusually overwhelmed by their experience. By including “open” suicide sites in the category of communities of affirmation it becomes easier to see their potential to act against suicidal behaviour, even while unreservedly discussing the value of suicide and exchanging information on the means toward it. Finding community in a suicide forum can be ameliorative in the absence of therapeutic intent.