Florida School Toolkit for K-12 Educators to Prevent Suicide

forth recommendations about how to contain a suicide cluster via safe messaging. These guidelines essentially state: refrain from using sensational language or normalizing suicide, avoid unnecessary repetition of the story, use neutral rather than emotionally charged photos, refrain from detailing the method of death, and take particular care when the suicide involves a celebrity (Meindle & Ivy, 2018; WHO 2017). The CDC put forth a community response plan for the prevention and containment of suicide clusters (in 1988), as well as postvention strategies once a cluster has occurred, though it has not since been updated. In 2017, the CDC produced a Technical Package for Prevention of Suicide, which includes strategies to help at the community and state level, but does not include strategies on the individual level (Stone et al., 2017). Technology and Suicide Contagion Estimates reveal that more than 90% of teens have smartphones (Bahrampour, 2018) and 95% have mobile access to the Internet (Pew Research Center, 2018), enabling adolescents to communicate using methods that distribute information almost instantly, to potentially hundreds of people simultaneously without geographical limitations; therefore, the effects of a student death by suicide may have even more far-reaching effects. Because adolescents use media an average of 9 hours a day (including TV, movies, online videos, playing games, Internet, music, reading, and social media), it is not surprising that more adolescents get their news from online sources rather than traditional media. Among adolescents who use social media, 76% receive news from such sites (Pew Research Center, 2018). Even if traditional media outlets follow established safe reporting guidelines for deaths by suicides, social media messages may not. Adolescents are in the forefront of information dissemination when a suicide of a peer occurs, effectively becoming “citizen journalists,” (public citizens who are actively collecting, reporting, and disseminating information). In fact, one study found that 59% of individuals ages 14 to 24 were exposed to suicide-related content through Internet sources (Dunlop, More, & Romer, 2011, as cited in Luxton, June, & Fairall, 2012). Evidence for “massive-scale contagion” via social networks has been found (Kramer, Guillory, & Hancock, 2014) as data revealed that emotions expressed by others on social media can influence our own emotions, even in the absence of in-person interaction and nonverbal cues, which may in turn affect a variety of offline behaviors. Essentially, this research shows that emotions can be spread on social media just like real life, which further supports the concept of contagion via exposure to a suicidal peer via social media (M. S. Gould, personal communication, April 2018). Social proximity among adolescents is progressively transcending physical geography. As a result, adolescent deaths by suicide are no longer isolated, which enables contagion to occur in a broader and more rapid manner. Consequently, the task of predicting and managing contagion is vastly more difficult for educators. Currently, there are few accepted guidelines to address safe messaging across social networks (Cox et al., 2012). However, in conjunction with a panel of experts, Suicide Awareness Voices of Education (SAVE) set forth recommendations for blogging on suicide, cautioning users, “It’s important to note that readers’ attitudes and behaviors can be influenced by what and how you write about suicide, mental health, crisis, and suicidal ideation—both negatively and positively” (p. 2), adding, “certain content related to suicide can have harmful or even fatal effects on vulnerable individuals who may be contemplating suicide themselves…. Bloggers can help reduce the risk of suicide and avoid spreading stigmatizing, counterproductive, or harmful messages” (p. 3). What More Can We Do? Following suit, perhaps educating the users, in this case adolescents, about safe messaging would be a promising future direction to continue to mitigate the impact of widespread 125