In a paper published recently, Chinese scientists at Institute of Psychology, reported they have discovered that suicidal ideation affected suicidal attempts through the mediational chains of suicide-related social media use behaviors, which included attended to suicidal information (attended-to), commented on / reposted suicidal information (commented-reposted), and talking about suicide (talking-about).

Because suicidal attempts can be acquired through suicide-related social media use behaviors, this study proposed three suicide-related social media use behaviors based on social cognitive theory, which proposes that successive processes governing behavior transition includes attentional, retention, production, and motivational processes.

The attentional process revolves around what people selectively pay attention to about the observed models. People with suicidal ideation would have preconceptions of suicide, and they may inadvertently come across or actively seek suicidal posts on the website because social networking sites are important sources of suicide stories. The processes for observational learning are retention and production. Retention involves the process of remembering the modeled activities. Production would be the deep processing of retention when learned behavior is generated through a “conception-matching process”. The Internet offers a large number of opportunities to retain and produce suicide information the users can attend to through functions such as commenting or reposting. Through commenting or reposting, people with suicidal ideation may process suicide information more deeply than they would by just attending to suicide information. Finally, the motivational process is the final stage to make the decision on whether one would act out on the acquired modeled behaviors. Suicidal social media users may participate in online suicide groups to discuss with like-minded individuals about successful suicide cases, general issues associated with suicide, or their own suicide plan. Moreover, they could directly talk about their own substantial suicide plan on the website publicly.

To examine the mediating role of the suicide-related social media use behaviors, a sample of 569 Chinese social media users with suicidal ideation completed a series of measures. The results demonstrated that suicide attempters showed a significantly higher level of suicidal ideation and more attended-to, commented-reposted, and talking-about behaviors. Suicidal ideation also affected suicide attempts through the mediational chains, as shown in figure 1.  

Figure 1. The mediating effect of social media use behaviors in the association between suicidal ideation and suicide attempt. Image by LIU Xingyun 

“When people talked about suicide online, there is a big chance that they mean it.” Said by Dr. ZHU Tingshao, the leader of this program. This study is the first study to focus on the identification of suicide-related social media use behaviors and illustration of the progression from suicidal ideation to suicide attempt. There are implications for population-based suicide prevention that can be achieved through identifying behavioral signals.

This research is supported by the National Basic Research Program of China, the Research Grants Council of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, China and et al.

This research is now published in The Journal of Medical Internet Research：
Xingyun Liu, Jiasheng Huang, Xiaonan Yu, et al. Mediation Effect of Suicide-Related Social Media Use Behaviors on the Association Between Suicidal Ideation and Suicide Attempt: Cross-Sectional Questionnaire Study. Journal of Medical Internet Research 2020, 22(4), e14940.

Contact:
Ms.Chen LIU
Institute of Psychology
Email: liuc@psych.ac.cn