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From The New York Times: Opinion | I Used Google Ads for Social Engineering. It Worked.
Ad campaigns that manipulate searchers’ behavior are frighteningly easy for anyone to run.
[...]Kevin Hines had one thought as he plummeted toward the Pacific Ocean: I can change anything in my life except the fact that I just jumped from the Golden Gate Bridge.
“One sentence could have stopped me,” Kevin wrote. “Had any one of the hundreds of passers-by engaged with me, it would … potentially have showed me that I had the ability to choose life.”
No person stopped Kevin from trying to kill himself. Could a Google ad have?
[...]Could Kevin have been redirected? Could he have been persuaded — by a few lines of ad copy and a persuasive landing page — not to jump? I wondered if I could redirect the next Kevin Hines. The goal of my first redirect campaign was to sway the ideology of suicidal people.
The problem my campaign addressed: Suicidal people are underserved on Google. In 2010, Google started making the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline the top result of certain searches relating to suicide. It also forced autocomplete not to finish such searches.
The weakness of Google’s initiative is that not enough variations of searches trigger the hotline. A search for “I am suicidal” will result in the hotline. But a search for “I’m going to end it” won’t always. “I intend to die” won’t ever. A lot of “higher-funnel” searches don’t trigger the hotline.
I hoped my redirect campaign would fill the gap in Google’s suicide algorithm. I would measure my campaign’s success by how many suicidal searchers clicked my ad and then called the number on my website, which forwarded to the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline.
Nine days after my campaign began, the ads were accepted by Google. My ad was the first result across the United States when someone Googled with suicidal intent. I showed unique ads to suicidal people who were physically located around the Golden Gate Bridge.
Nearly one in three searchers who clicked my ad dialed the hotline — a conversion rate of 28 percent. The average Google Ads conversion rate is 4 percent.
The campaign’s 28 percent conversion rate was met in the first week. Not counting people who thought I was associated with lifeline or who did not read the ad or language on my website, that leaves a rate suggesting there’s a need in this ad space that is not being met.
[...]Mr. Berlinquette is a Google certified partner, and the founder of the search engine marketing consulting firm Berlin SEM.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 11 2019, @01:10PM (11 children)
I'm not convinced that suicide must be prevented at all costs. It is the ultimate free exercise of self determination. No force in the universe can reverse or punish a successful suicide. Do humans not have the right to self determination? Be that as it may, I would be devastated if someone in my life took theirs but do my wants and needs trump their free will?
That brings me to a second point. Does the mere proposal of suicide indicate mental problems that preclude making that choice as a sound decision?
(Score: 5, Interesting) by GreatAuntAnesthesia on Thursday July 11 2019, @02:45PM (6 children)
Copypasta from last suicide thread:
Right... let's pretend that one day your best friend learns that he had been fired in disgrace from his job, and his bank account had been emptied by thieves, and his wife is leaving and taking the dog with her because she has been fucking the dog, and all his family suddenly hates him as a penniless dog-cucked loser. And so your friend takes the decision to end his own life. "Oh well", you say, "it's your choice. Bye, buddy."
Except... It turns out none of that is true! At the last moment you learn that he still has his job and his money and his wife and his family and his dog! In some bizarre sitcom-esque twist of events, he had been given completely erroneous information! Everything is actually OK! Surely in this case, you would intervene! "Wait! Stop! None of it is true! It's all OK, you don't have to do it!"
I suspect your friend would be very grateful that you stopped him from doing something both unnecessary and irrevocable.
Well, that's kind of how mental illness works. People try to kill themselves because they believe that nobody loves them and nobody cares and it doesn't matter to anyone whether they live or die and they themselves don't care enough to bother carry on living anyway. They believe it not because it's true, but because their brain chemistry is all fucked up. It's the same situation.
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 11 2019, @02:56PM
With a pink slip and the divorce papers on the table, you would have to be fucking delusional if you thought it wasn't real.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 11 2019, @05:48PM (1 child)
That's kind of my point though. Does just the contemplation of suicide indicate mental illness? Are you clinically crazy if you want to kill yourself?
I've been around BPD and bipolar people and I am grateful neither I nor my kids have any of those issues. I've personally known four people over the years who seriously contemplated suicide at some point in their lives and I can honestly say I thought every one of them was at least a little crazy before hand. The first is being treated and "normal" but still eccentric. The next is still crazy but alive. The third one attempted suicide but is now on meds and living a "normal" life. The last one blew his brains out in front of some friends and co-workers who came to his home to do a welfare check on him.
(Score: 2) by All Your Lawn Are Belong To Us on Friday July 12 2019, @04:35PM
Here's the problem. Having a mental illness is a medical diagnosis. It therefore requires one to have been examined and diagnosed with such. Competent professionals do not issue a mental diagnosis without having an interview with the individual. ('duty to warn' notwithstanding but that's why those ethical guides were created).
"Crazy" is not a word a professional will recognize and it only helps to further stigmatize people it is applied to.
A professional might ask: Does a person have to have impaired judgment and insight in order to contemplate suicide? Does someone considering suicide automatically have an impairment or deficit to functional living which needs to be addressed? And as I hinted earlier above, the answer may not be necessarily yes in all cases. On the other hand, I think your experience is not totally uncommon that most people who have attempted suicide have demonstrated impaired judgment with the attempt and may not be internally processing the world correctly for functioning within it either emotionally, cognitively, or behaviorally.
This sig for rent.
(Score: 2) by J_Darnley on Thursday July 11 2019, @06:51PM
Do I have any reason to believe he isn't a "penniless dog-cucked loser"? Sounds like a good reason to me. I'd probably blow my brains out in that situation had I the freedom and right to gun ownership.
Granted I might not be the best person to answer since I don't have any (close) friends so I don't have anyone to picture my life without.
(Score: 2) by black6host on Friday July 12 2019, @12:35AM
More like someone played his life backwards like the country music record, I'd say, lol.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 12 2019, @05:23AM
Thanks for the sig ;)
(Score: 3, Interesting) by edIII on Thursday July 11 2019, @11:12PM (1 child)
I've thought about ending my own life, and doing so as a sound decision. Severe medical issues cause you to look at suicide a litttttle bit differently. I strongly believe I have a right to self determination as well. I don't know about ultimate expression of self determination. It's certainly the last one.
That being said, most suicides are due to mental illness, or the profound perception that you have no other choice. I'm only alive today because intellectually I did determine that I still had a choice, and I could fight. It was my own self determination that saved me in a way, and those truly at risk for it have kinda lost that. Life has been reduced down to a single path, and you see no other way out.
As for "no other force .. can reverse of punish....", all I can say is that is your opinion. None of us knows what lies in the afterlife, nor we can claim true knowledge of reversal or punishment. I'm also quite spiritual, so the punishment did factor into my decision making as well. Feelings about suicide, its morality, its worth, are also strongly cultural.
Just because somebody says they want to commit suicide doesn't preclude them being in sound mind. However, I would say that is perhaps rare. It certainly justifies taking a moment to talk and help the person, because so much of time there is an alternative to suicide in some form of assistance. We should be against it by default, at nearly all costs. Our compassion should lead us to create "infrastructure" for a safety net to help people.
Those rare moments where it may make some sense, are exceptional in nature, and predominately medical. Only then can we say the costs may be too great. The person about to jump off a bridge almost never meets those conditions, and in reality has a choice. It's important that we make access to that choice, and to help guide them. The scary thing about life is that we can easily find ourselves on the other side of the argument.
For anyone truly thinking about it, all I can tell you is that there is another choice. I promise. Pick up the phone and call the National Hotline. Suicide Prevention Life Line [suicidepreventionlifeline.org].
Technically, lunchtime is at any moment. It's just a wave function.
(Score: 2) by pdfernhout on Friday July 12 2019, @12:44AM
Thanks for sharing your story and thoughts and a prevention link. Another resource is a book called "Out of the Nightmare: Recovery From Depression And Suicidal Pain", by David L. Conroy, discussed on the Metanoia website: https://www.metanoia.org/suicide/ [metanoia.org]
Some key ideas from the book are summarized on that site: "Suicide is not chosen; it happens when pain exceeds resources for coping with pain. That's all it's about. You are not a bad person, or crazy, or weak, or flawed, because you feel suicidal. It doesn't even mean that you really want to die - it only means that you have more pain than you can cope with right now. If I start piling weights on your shoulders, you will eventually collapse if I add enough weights... no matter how much you want to remain standing. Willpower has nothing to do with it. Of course you would cheer yourself up, if you could. Don't accept it if someone tells you, "That's not enough to be suicidal about." There are many kinds of pain that may lead to suicide. Whether or not the pain is bearable may differ from person to person. What might be bearable to someone else, may not be bearable to you. The point at which the pain becomes unbearable depends on what kinds of coping resources you have. Individuals vary greatly in their capacity to withstand pain. When pain exceeds pain-coping resources, suicidal feelings are the result. Suicide is neither wrong nor right; it is not a defect of character; it is morally neutral. It is simply an imbalance of pain versus coping resources. You can survive suicidal feelings if you do either of two things: (1) find a way to reduce your pain, or (2) find a way to increase your coping resources. Both are possible."
As I've written elsewhere ( https://github.com/pdfernhout/High-Performance-Organizations-Reading-List [github.com] ), one of the fundamental challenges in an organization or society is to destigmatize asking for help to avoid the classic dilemma those with suicidal thoughts face when they expect asking for help will only increase their pain from whatever reactions occur -- such as job loss or being ejected from a university community. By reconceptualizing suicide as an involuntary action that occurs when total pain exceeds resources for coping with pain, David Conroy provides a morally neutral way for organizations and society to think about suicide prevention in a productive way.
Rather than focus mainly on intervening in a crisis, organizations can rethink their operations to reduce participant pain and to increase coping resources. This helps everyone in the organization, not just those who have reached a threshold where pain is very close to coping resources. Early intervention is much cheaper and more successful than waiting for a crisis. This model shows how organizations can approach suicide intervention in hundreds of way. One of those ways is also making people aware of success stories where individuals overcame depression and related suicidal thoughts.
Aggregate pain includes physical pain, emotional pain, and social pain. Reducing pain in any area by even a small amount may bring a person below a threshold for suicide. Similarly there are many types of coping resources from interacting with a friend, to going to a funny movie, to receiving adequate health care, to interacting with a pet. There are also some short-term coping strategies like denial or drinking which may have long-term negative consequences that become new sources of pain when done to excess.
As pointed out in that book, there are many mentally ill people who are not suicidal -- but being mentally ill often contributes pain to a life and so becomes a risk factor increasing aggregate pain.
Books like "The Globalization of Addiction: A Study in Poverty of the Spirit" and "Lost Connections: Why You’re Depressed and How to Find Hope" and similar (BlueZones, the Depression Cure, etc.) suggest that, while many people can do a lot to make their individual surroundings healthier (especially with some support from other people), ultimately making 21st-century Western society less painful and less alienating for everyone will involve some broader social choices beyond the level of the individual... In that sense, suicide, depression, and addiction are more like symptoms reflecting deeper social issues than being illnesses of specific individuals (even as right now many individuals may need to try to handle such challenges on their own as best they can within a dysfunctional environment).
The biggest challenge of the 21st century: the irony of technologies of abundance used by scarcity-minded people.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 11 2019, @11:34PM
Is it truly "my will" if I have a chemical imbalance in my brain.
I don't know.
(Score: 2) by All Your Lawn Are Belong To Us on Friday July 12 2019, @03:30PM
Depends on how you mean suicide. If a person has a terminal illness and is experiencing constant pain to a degree that there is no fulfillment in life anymore and as far as anyone can predict the pain will continue until the person's last breath without ceasing.... Is such a person wanting to end his or her life insane, or is that a rational decision? Is that suicide? On the other hand, in many other cases there are provable psychological drivers such as depression or schizophrenia at work. Does the person who hears a voice telling them to end it all have the ability to refuse consent for treatment? There absolutely are people who do not have rational cause who attempt suicide.
And to add another interesting fact to the conversation, most adolescents who attempt suicide (60%) are not diagnosed with any mental illness at the time of their decision.
To the article proper, there are many people who exhibit behaviors which in retrospect seemed rather obvious, such as being incredibly worked up and then suddenly and calmly at peace because they're "figured it out", or they give away possessions with great personal meaning to friends and relatives systematically and think they are clearly signalling their intentions. In other words, many do it without saying anything overt and yet people feel guilty afterwards because there were behaviors they felt they should have recognized (behaviors that are in fact increased with increased suicidiality). There will be cases the machines will not be able to catch, but a human being who knows the person might.
More food for thought [medium.com], including the oft-repeated meme (which I think is correct but can't cite) that survivors of jumping the Golden Gate bridge all change their minds after they jumped.
Finally, consider that most people who are intercepted and stopped end up not committing suicide later. People are only held for as long as it can be proven that they intend to harm themselves and the vast majority will be free to try again. A sadly distressing number do try again, but the fact that there are interventions which work in a majority of cases. (1 in 25 try again and succeed within 5 years according to the NY Times [nytimes.com], which means 24 of 25 or 96% do not try again in 5 years.) People change their minds and then survive again. I'd say interfering is worth it.
This sig for rent.