Social Media And Suicide.

Social media has become an significant part of our lives since it was introduced to us. It has been a blessing and a curse both in it's own way. It surely helps people to connect with friends, family and other loved ones or anybody from around the world for

that matter but it also detaches them from forming real relationships. Suicide related to social media is a new age phenomenon.

Suicide has been a dominant cause of death worldwide. Suicide rates have increased significantly in the last couple years, this shows that use of social media affects and changes people's lives especially in teenagers. As the internet becomes

more ingrained in people's everyday life, they are not aware of the mental and emotional issues they can cause to an individual.

Social media is helpful in connecting people together but it also makes it easy for people to cyberbully or cyber criminals to target innocent people. Cyberbullying, E-mail blackmailing, Cyber threats have led to many cases of self harm and suicides.

Suicide is a public health problem, mostly affected are the teenagers and young adults.
The internet has also become a way for people to gain information about suicide and lethal ways to kill themselves.

Social media platforms such as chat rooms and discussion forums may cause risk for vulnerable groups, particularly interactions via chat rooms may cause peer pressure to die by suicide. In general, evidence is growing that social media can influence

prosuicide behavior.
But not all is curse with internet, there are social networking sites for suicide prevention that can connect with peers with similar experiences and increase awareness about prevention sites, crisis helplines and other support groups.

Public health is concerned with protecting and improving of the health of entire population be it small or large. Also to prevent vulnerable groups from cyber crime.

Legal issues must also be kept in mind while considering public health while considering the problems of social media and suicide. Particularly, the legal issues associated with monitoring and filtering of content on the internet.

The role of social media and its potential influence on suicide-related behavior is a new and evolving phenomenon that society is only beginning to understand. Social media are mostly created and controlled by users, so the opportunity for surveillance and

prevention can be extended to all users. To help facilitate this approach to prevention all social media sites could adopt simple-to-use methods for users to report malicious web sites and activities of other users. Public health campaigns should be used to increase awareness about such issues in schools, colleges and other areas beneficial. Finally, using social media to increase awareness of mental health issues is the new age public health approach that can potentially save lives.