Tweets regarding suicide prevention might prevent suicide

A scientific team led by Thomas Niederkrotenthaler and Hannah Metzler from MedUni Vienna and Complexity Science Hub Vienna analysed approximately seven million postings on the topic of suicide and suicide prevention on Twitter. In the process, it was shown that content on the prevention and management of suicidal crises increased the number of contacts with mental health services. Thus, the researchers were able to provide a quantifiable verification for the potential of social media in the prevention of suicide with their studies published in the Australian & New Zealand Journal of Psychiatry and the Journal of Medical Internet Research for the first time. For the exact analysis of the 7,150,610 tweets posted on the topics of suicide and suicide prevention during the two-year observation period, the researchers used so-called deep learning models. In contrast to the tools used in earlier studies, not only the occurrence of individual words, but also the context in which these terms are used can be analysed with the assistance of this method. "Since words can have different meanings in certain contexts, we achieve much more precise results with the Deep Learning model," says Hannah Metzler of the Complexity Science Hub Vienna and the Institute for Complex Systems Science MedUni Vienna, explaining the special feature of the method developed specifically for the research. More evidence for the "Papageno Effect"