Facebook Can Save Lives!

Facebook Friends Get Police To Act On Suicide Posting

By Raphael Ahren
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1069154.html

The morning after a depressed Kfar Yona resident posted a suicide note on his Facebook profile and sent farewell e-mails to his friends, a frenzy of messages and calls from around the world prompted local police to send a patrol, which found the man unharmed.

Shortly before midnight Monday, the 50-year-old, English-born immigrant changed his Facebook status to "I am contemplating my suicide right now. I have just had enough. Love to all my friends!" About an hour later, a concerned friend called his residence, but his wife, unaware that her husband had publicized the note, ignored the ringing phone.

The man, an unemployed cancer survivor, has only 21 contacts on Facebook, a popular social networking site. He sent a more detailed e-mail to 26 friends, in which he explained that he had "reached the end of a very bumpy road and I have finally decided to terminate my life because I really can't cope anymore. Living in Israel gave me a purpose and a reason for living, and now that same Israel has taken away my purpose for living!"

Joel Leyden, a New York-born Ra'anana resident, saw the man's message about 12 hours after it was posted. Because he was in London and felt helpless, he immediately changed his Facebook status to: "EMERGENCY - IF YOU ARE IN ISRAEL - MY FRIEND... IN KFAR YONA WANTS TO COMMIT SUICIDE - CALL POLICE."

Leyden, who works in Internet marketing, has more than 2,600 Facebook contacts, many of whom saw his note and called the man's home or the police. Jimmy Schwarzkopf, an American-born IT specialist living in Moshav Bnei Zion, was one of Leyden's friends who saw the message. He immediately asked his co-worker Shiri Elgavish to call the Netanya police, which is responsible for Kfar Yona.

"I spoke to an officer, but he told me that they had already received a lot of calls from all over the world, and that they are on the way to him," Elgavish told Anglo File. When two police officers arrived at the family's residence, they found that the man was surrounded by family and friends and was in no immediate danger. "No one knows what he might have done," the man's South African-born wife told Anglo File. "I suppose you could say that his friends who called and forwarded emergency messages saved his life."

Explaining her husband's downturn, she said, "He just recovered from lymphoma, and has a difficult time coping with things. A few things came together, and something must have flipped him out that night. That's why he wrote this note. While he was going through chemotherapy, a lot of his friends called and visited often to support him. Once his treatment was over, people went back to their regular lives. They still called, but less frequently. But for [my husband], the worry that the cancer might come back is always there, and having his all this attention that pretty suddenly disappears was quite hard for him." The woman also said her husband is currently desperately looking for employment, and it pains him deeply to be unable to support his family.

The couple has a 7-year-old son. "But since [this week's incident], the phone hasn't stopped ringing," his wife said. "He's a lot better already."

Suicide notes via Internet are quite common. For that reason, the Israel Police's Crisis Negotiations Unit three and a half years ago established a special team of six officers assigned to identify potential suicide risks on the Internet. Israel was the first country to establish such a unit.