Rosas first called a suicide hotline about her concern, but was referred to police in her hometown. Rosas told USA Today she had previously followed the teen's depression on the girl's blog, so she knew the suicide threat was serious. On May 6, she saw a posting on a teen blog discussing suicide.
Rosas is no stranger to the blogosphere, as she frequents Tumblr, a social networking site. But if the message keeps you entrenched (in self-harming), that outweighs the benefits of connecting to others.A 16-year-old girl's life has been saved, thanks to the online detective work of Cathedral City, CA, resident Jackie Rosas and police. "We want to connect people with other pro-recovery users, because we understand that it feels good to be understood. "We're trying to counteract some of these unhealthy messages and provide an alternative," said Claire Mysko, who oversees NEDA's teen outreach. The organization has lobbied many sites, including Tumblr and Facebook, to enforce self-harm policies. NEDA also recently launched its own personal social network, a Web site called Proud2BMe, that invites people suffering from eating disorders to share their stories in a more regulated environment. NEDA has recruited several of its writers from Tumblr's nascent anti-harm space, where blogs such as "The Love Yourself Challenge" post bright, uplifting messages - and slap them with hashtags including "anorexia" and "cutting," so that self-harm bloggers such as Anouschka see them. TWLOHA, an organization particularly popular among women of high school and college age, has amassed nearly 250,000 followers on Tumblr with its mix of feel-good testimonials and artsy, Tumblr-friendly illustrations. Both have tried to stake their flags in social media spaces that were once dominated by pro-harm bloggers. NEDA, the eating-disorder advocacy group, and To Write Love on Her Arms, an anti-suicide organization, have some ideas.
TEEN SUICIDE BAND TUMBLR HOW TO
That leaves both social networks and clinicians with a difficult contradiction to resolve: how to help teens with depression, eating disorders and other mental illnesses harness the benefits of social media but not the harms. Self-harm blogs still flourish on Tumblr, with as many as an estimated 197,200 discussing mutilation and eating-disorder terms, according to SimilarWeb.Ī recent study of French eating-disorder blogs by researchers at France's Telecom ParisTech and the University of Greenwich suggested the ban hasn't actually silenced self-harm bloggers but simply made them go underground, where it's more difficult for advocacy groups and other healthier, more hopeful voices to reach them. While self-harm content has been banned on Tumblr, one of the most popular blog platforms, since February 2012, almost 200,000 bloggers still use language related to eating disorders and self-injury, according to SimilarWeb, an analytics firm that tracks aggregate Web data.Įighteen months later, however, there's little to suggest the ban has worked. To others, they can be disturbing: sites dedicated solely to cutting, suicide or eating disorders, replete with stomach-turning details, high-contrast photos and song lyrics from depressive teen bands. Self-harm blogs are little understood outside the largely female, teen community that reads and writes them.
But 14-year-old Anouschka, a baby-faced blogger, has lived here for months, collecting photos of slashed wrists and razor blades, reading grim, adolescent poems about death and loneliness - and meeting the first community of friends that she has ever really had. Self-harm blogs shelter in a dark, desperate corner of the Internet that few of us will ever see. Self-harm blogs pose problems and opportunities An illustration of a teenager writing a letter with cut marks on wrist.
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