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It was big Web news on Friday when Demi Moore responded to an allegedly suicidal tweeter, who had written the actress an online message via Twitter, threatening to kill herself. Moore, along with other Twitter users, tracked the woman who wrote the message to San Jose, California, and many called the police there.* That woman is currently under psychiatric care. Today, there is another story of a suicide intervention via social networking, this time using Facebook. According to the Daily Mail, a 16-year-old boy from Oxford was chatting via Facebook with a Maryland girl when he started talking about suicide and wrote, "I’m going away to do something I’ve been thinking about for a while then everyone will find out." The Maryland girl smartly told her parents, who contacted the British Embassy in D.C., who then called Scotland Yard. The police eventually found the boy, who was alive but had overdosed on pills.
All of this brings me back to an earlier point I made about Peggy Orenstein's essay on Facebook. She argued that teens today will miss out on "growth through loneliness" because they're constantly in contact with other people. For these people to make threats of suicide to virtual strangers shows a profound disconnect, rather than a feeling of satisfying interpersonal interaction. If you need Demi Moore to save you from yourself, you're a very sad person indeed.
Correction, April 6, 2009: in the original post, it was incorrectly stated that the Twitter was traced to San Diego, CA.