1. Suicide Prevention and Social
Media:
A framework for Young Australians
using
Community of Inquiry (CoI)
Suku Sukunesan and Ashir Ahmed
Swinburne University of Technology

2. Outline
• Background
• Issues – Cyberbullying, Suicide ideation,
Reporting Suicide
• Proposed framework – CoI
• Operationalising the framework
• Conclusions and Future work

3. Social media boasts plenty of
benefits and increasingly kids are
introduced early.

4. • SM has presented a new set of
challenges in the field of suicide
prevention (Robinson et al., 2014,
Katz et al., 2014) and self-harm.

5. Cyberbullying
• Cyberbullying is rife within SM and the
numbers of victims are alarming (Price and
Dalgeish, 2010; Robinson, 2012).
• Cyberbullying (Schenk and Fremouw, 2012)
and SM sites that glorifies suicide (Sisask and
Varnik, 2012) have a strong link to suicide
ideation
• This provokes suicidal copycat behaviour
called the ‘Werther effect’

6. Intentional self-harm hospitalisations
by sex, persons of all ages and 15-24
years, 1992/93 – 2011/12
Blue – male
Red - female
Suicide rates per 100,000 population
across various age groups in 2010
(Australian Bureau of Statistics, 2012)
Blue – male
Red - female

7. The vulnerable young
• Easily influenced by media, fictional movies and characters.
Most of them (especially men) believe that they are strong
enough to deal with any problem without any external help
or assistance
• Unwillingness to seek help is contributed partly by
negative beliefs about the usefulness of therapy and
therapists or having no experience of previous professional
mental health care (Jarkon–Horlick and Morrissey, 1997).
• Lower intention to seek help (Rickwood et al., 2007;
Wilson and Deane, 2010) and higher intention seek no
help at all (Fergusson and Horwood, 2010)
• Only a small proportion of cases get timely and evidence-based
treatments (Sanderson, Corry and Lapsely, 2000)

8. Contextual Role of SM
• An advantage of using social media applications for suicide
prevention and outreach is that they facilitate social connections
among peers with similar experiences (Luxton et al., 2011).
• Collin et al. (2010) argue that ‘strong sense of community and
belonging fostered by social media has the potential to promote
resilience, which helps young people to successfully adapt to change
and stressful events’.
• Ability to update users on recent medical information including
sources of help, provision of self-assessment and also the
opportunity for real-time intervention (Robinson et al., 2014).
• Burns et al. (2013) presented an evidence based literature review
of over 50 cases examining the use of social media by young people
that showed significant benefits to their mental health by delivering
educational outcomes; facilitating supportive relationships, identity
formation and promoting a sense of belonging and self-esteem.

9. Community of Inquiry (1)
• The framework, called the Community of
Inquiry (CoI) model was first proposed by
Garrison, Anderson and Archer (2000) and has
been used extensively in education research.
• The CoI Framework proposes that learning
occurs through the interaction of 3 elements,
viz. cognitive presence, social presence and
teaching presence.

10. Community of Inquiry (2)
• Cognitive presence refers to the extent
to which the participants in the
community are able to construct
meaning through their rich
communication.
• Social presence is the extent to which
participants can project their personal
characteristics to the community.
• The teaching presence refers to the
dual functions of design and
facilitation of educational experience.

11. CoI in Context (1)
• Cognitive Presence is enhanced through social media’s
ability to crowd source various ideas and approaches to
overcome suicide prevention.
• There is no silver bullet but various social media
applications as mentioned by Kaplan and Haenlein (2010)
would require unique but concerted effort.
• This would facilitate vulnerable young people to build
meaning through ongoing communication involving other
individuals experiencing the same situation.
• This collective knowledge also helps social exploration of
ideas to combat suicide prevention mainly in reducing
suicide ideation (Eichenberg, 2008; Harris et al., 2009).
• This space can include external research organisations that
are not affiliated with the Australian government such as
the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline
(www.suicidepreventionlifeline.org) or American Suicide
Prevention Foundation (www.aspf.org).

12. CoI in context (2)
• Social Presence is characterized by young people’s
ability to participate in various online social
environments.
• This allows them to assume an identity while
developing valuable links with the community for
socio-emotional support.
• Studies have shown that young people are known to
practice open collaborative social interaction
(Robinson, 2012).
• Social presence is particularly important as young
people are immature in decision making (Viner,
2005) and they do need to establish a healthy online
social life without adverse elements like
cyberbullying which has strong relationship with
suicide ideation (Schenk and Fremouw, 2012).

13. CoI in context (3)
• Teaching Presence represents guidance and structure
provided by government, health department or people
with authority given the mandate to curb suicide
among young people.
• This involves the usage of social media to roll out
structured programs for suicide prevention involving
design, facilitation and monitoring of the activities with
the aim to educate young people with the support of
the legal framework.
• Programs such as BoysTown (2010), and
Bullying.Noway (2014), and organisations such as the
Orygen Youth Health (oyh.org.au), Australian Suicide
Prevention Foundation (www.aspf.com.au), Sane
Australia (sane.org), Suicide Prevention Australia
(suicidepreventionaust.org), Beyond Blue
(www.beyondblue.org.au) and Lifeline Australia
(lifeline.org.au) would fall into this category.

14. CoI in context (4)
• Supporting Discourse is mainly characterised by young people
reaching out to general public and non-governmental bodies
about suicide prevention. Various social media applications play
host to support a range of forums run by qualified volunteers
such as the International Suicide Prevention Wiki
(http://suicideprevention.wikia.com/wiki/Online). Sites as this
have discussion forums, live chats, videos, pictures and other
interactive media allowing young people to share experiences
and ideas from people around the world.
• Selecting Content could be described by government’s action is
identifying appropriate forums using the social media platform
to encourage and allow public contribution. This would include
joint programs with external bodies in addressing suicide
prevention such as the Orygen Youth Health (OYH) which has
connections to the public. The support it has garnered has made
it popular and similar model has been emulated in other parts
around the world including countries such as the UK, Canada,
Switzerland, Norway, Denmark, The Netherlands, Hong Kong and
Singapore (OYH, 2014).

15. CoI in context (5)
• Supporting Discourse is mainly characterised by young people
reaching out to general public and non-governmental bodies
about suicide prevention. Various social media applications play
host to support a range of forums run by qualified volunteers
such as the International Suicide Prevention Wiki
(http://suicideprevention.wikia.com/wiki/Online). Sites as this
have discussion forums, live chats, videos, pictures and other
interactive media allowing young people to share experiences
and ideas from people around the world.
• Selecting Content could be described by government’s action is
identifying appropriate forums using the social media platform
to encourage and allow public contribution. This would include
joint programs with external bodies in addressing suicide
prevention such as the Orygen Youth Health (OYH) which has
connections to the public. The support it has garnered has made
it popular and similar model has been emulated in other parts
around the world including countries such as the UK, Canada,
Switzerland, Norway, Denmark, The Netherlands, Hong Kong and
Singapore (OYH, 2014).

16. CoI in context (6)
• Setting climate exemplifies good government initiatives in approaching
young people on suicide prevention. This space represents attempt by
government and health authorities to capitalise various social media
applications to create appropriate spaces suitable for various groups of
young people to participate. Programs such as Bullying.Noway (2014),
Itsallright (2014) by Sane Australia, OYH Youth program (OYH, 2014) and
Headspace (2014) are all good examples within this space.
• Ideal Experience represents best practice where all involved parties have
successfully worked together using the social media platform in
addressing suicide prevention. In the recent 2014 National Suicide
Prevention Conference held in Perth, one such program stood out,
ReachOut (http://au.reachout.com/). The ReachOut site have been
exemplary with more than 1.3 million unique visitors each year which
also highlights the major health challenge facing young Australians.
• A survey on this program revealed that almost half (46%) of its visitors
are more likely to seek additional help from other professional sources
after visiting the service, reinforcing the critical and successful role
ReachOut.com plays in reducing stigma (Robinson et al. 2014) and
encouraging young people to seek further assistance (2013 ReachOut
Survey, 2014).

17. CoI in context (7)
Challenges
• The Social Presence space is huge and has no bounds.
• Hard to enforce guidelines and policies as most social media
applications based overseas which involves inter-jurisdictional legal
issues (Katz et al., 2014).
• Monitoring all these sites is challenging where perpetrators can
seamlessly move to other social applications and reoffend using
other pseudonyms or assuming other alter egos.
• Other problems include, host site having poor resources or lack of
accountability to curb deviant activities. Even when the host sites
are responsible, some victims are so young and naïve that they are
continuously bullied or discriminated over long periods of time
without knowledge especially younger kids or new users (Robinson,
2012).

18. CoI in context (8)
Challenges
• Within the Cognitive Presence revolve around the issues of responding in time,
finding the right resource, getting the proper assistance and the right intervention.
• Rodriguez et al. (2014) noted that there many community sites built by volunteers,
students, unqualified individuals and others who have been through suicidal
ideation. Though their intent could be genuine they lack in the required skills in
addressing the problem and they are not affiliated to government or health
organisation.
• Due to lack of funding most of these sites are keener to promote about what they
do rather than to actually deliver the service in hope to get sponsorship and get
more traffic (Robinson et al., 2014).
• Responsibilities should also be taken by major social media platforms to address
this crisis given the number of users and gravity of the issue. i.e. Tumblr, Facebook,
Twitter, YouTube and MySpace have lately taken a keen interest in placing safety
and reporting mechanisms which connect their services to police and other
government bodies.

19. CoI in context (9)
Challenges
• Shortages of funding, lack of understanding about the
social media and lack of resources have been the major
issues compounding the Teaching presence.
• Not all programs are successful as ReachOut despite the
government’s effort in addressing suicide prevention.
• It has also been obvious that there isn’t sufficient research
established to date to be modelled as an accepted practice
using social media to deliver interventions while addressing
the ethical concerns. Though there are several studies
which are on the way, findings are still in early stages (see
OYR, 2014; Young and Well Cooperative Research Centre,
2014).

20. Conclusion and Future
• Social media stands out as a great avenue to
be explored for this research due to its uptake,
features, diversity and capability.
• Authors have adapted the CoI framework to
address the issue.
• Future work will involve the validation of the
CoI model based on the projects mentioned
above i.e ReachOut, BoysTown,
Bullying.Noway, Orygen Youth Health etc.