Temporal and daily changes in social media posts to assisted suicide forums
Rates of suicide attempts and deaths are highest on Mondays, and these occur more frequently in the morning or early afternoon, suggesting weekly temporal and daily variations in suicidal behavior. It is unclear if there is a similar temporal trend in social media for suicide-related posts. We aimed to identify temporal and daily changes in posting patterns on the Reddit forum SuicideWatch, an online community for individuals who may be at risk of suicide or know someone who is at risk of suicide.
Dutta, R., Gkotsis, G., Velupillai, S., etal. Temporal and diurnal variation in social media postings to an assisted suicide forum. BMC Mental 21, 259 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1186/s12888-021-03268-1
Commentary
The study used time series analysis to compare the date and timestamp of 90,518 SuicideWatch posts from December 1, 2008 to August 31, 2015 with (i) 6,616,431 posts on AskReddit, the most commonly subscribed general subreddit (ii) 66,934 of these AskReddit posts.
As a result of this analysis, Monday had the highest percentage of posts to SuicideWatch and a clear daily variation was observed, with a peak in the early morning (2:00-5:00 h) and a decrease to a trough in the late night/early afternoon (11:00-14:00 h). On the contrary, it was reported that the highest number of submissions of control data was between 20:00 and 23:00.
Thus, posts to SuicideWatch were found to be associated with suicide risk, as they occurred most frequently on Mondays. This should help target the population with support and suicide prevention interventions when they are most needed, as they peak in the early morning hours of the same day.
Nevertheless, we do not have knowledge of the underlying factors that cause people to post to this subreddit. This study only analyzed the timing of postings, not their content, so not all postings may be "suicide-related.
