Suicide ideation of individuals in online social networks
Authors: Naoki Masuda, Issei Kurahashi, Hiroko Onari
AI-generated Key Points
- Suicide among adolescents in Japan and other countries is a leading cause of death in this age group.
- Social isolation is a contributing factor to suicidal behavior.
- Little research has explored the impact of social isolation within explicit social networks.
- Researchers analyzed a large dataset from a popular social networking service in Japan.
- Logistic regression analysis was used to identify user characteristics related or unrelated to social networks and their contribution to suicide ideation.
- Factors associated with suicide ideation include the number of communities a user belongs to, the presence of intransitivity, and the fraction of suicidal neighbors within the social network.
- Age and gender have minimal impact on suicide ideation.
- Similar results were observed for depressive symptoms, suggesting an overlap between suicidal tendencies and depression within online social networks.
- The study sheds light on the complex relationship between social networks and suicide ideation among adolescents.
- Findings can inform targeted interventions and support systems aimed at preventing youth suicides both in Japan and globally.
Abstract: Suicide explains the largest number of death tolls among Japanese adolescents in their twenties and thirties. Suicide is also a major cause of death for adolescents in many other countries. Although social isolation has been implicated to influence the tendency to suicidal behavior, the impact of social isolation on suicide in the context of explicit social networks of individuals is scarcely explored. To address this question, we examined a large data set obtained from a social networking service dominant in Japan. The social network is composed of a set of friendship ties between pairs of users created by mutual endorsement. We carried out the logistic regression to identify users' characteristics, both related and unrelated to social networks, which contribute to suicide ideation. We defined suicide ideation of a user as the membership to at least one active user-defined community related to suicide. We found that the number of communities to which a user belongs to, the intransitivity (i.e., paucity of triangles including the user), and the fraction of suicidal neighbors in the social network, contributed the most to suicide ideation in this order. Other characteristics including the age and gender contributed little to suicide ideation. We also found qualitatively the same results for depressive symptoms.
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