Facebook creates suicide prevention measures for army members

PanARMENIAN.Net - Facebook has created a series of suicide prevention measures for members of the armed forces with profiles on the social network, The Telegraph reported.

The new program allows servicemen and women and their families access to a set of customized features when a piece of content they upload is flagged as suicidal.

The social network’s team of engineers have developed a way of identifying military personnel and their families. This will allow them to refer them to military specific resources, such as The Veterans Crisis Line, as and when their content is flagged as harmful.

Facebook’s new tools are an extension of the suicide prevention effort the social network launched at the end of last year.

“While this is helpful for a military family, there are several specific resources provided to our nation’s military that we wanted to make sure they were aware of at their time of need,” said American military support organization Blue Star Families, which partnered with Facebook for the effort, in a statement. The Department of Veterans Affairs also teamed up with the social network for the launch.

Last March Facebook teamed up with the Samaritans to discourage suicide, after the friends and family of a woman who announced on Facebook that she would be taking her own life demanded to know why no-one helped her.

Simone Back, 42, was pronounced dead in hospital on Boxing Day 2010 less than 24 hours after threatening on the website to take an overdose.

Friends are urged via Facebook's help centre (www.facebook.com/help) to call the Samaritans if they see suicidal content.

If the content suggests somebody is imminently about to take their life, then people are recommended to call the police.

They are also directed to a Facebook form where they can copy in the URL address of the page where they have seen a worrying status update or wall post. They can do this anonymously.

Facebook will then pass on the name and email address of the vulnerable person to the Samaritans, who will get in touch within 12 hours.

Facebook said their privacy policy allows this information to be passed on.

A recent study of 2,891 military family members by Blue Star Families found that 10 per cent of respondents had considered suicide and nine per cent said that they knew a service member who had thought about suicide.

Around 86 per cent of military families on Facebook say that they use the service daily.