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posted by martyb on Thursday July 11 2019, @08:27AM   Printer-friendly
from the jump-starting-suicide-prevention dept.

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.


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  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by edIII on Thursday July 11 2019, @11:12PM (1 child)

    by edIII (791) on Thursday July 11 2019, @11:12PM (#866019)

    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.
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  • (Score: 2) by pdfernhout on Friday July 12 2019, @12:44AM

    by pdfernhout (5984) on Friday July 12 2019, @12:44AM (#866047) Homepage

    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.