"Suicide Surfers"

What is a  "suicide surfer"?

Suicide surfers are people who are contemplating if life is worth living or not, and who surf the Internet to find information about suicide, either information about support and help aganinst thoughts of suicide, or the opposite..

 - The opposite?

- The opposite does exist, namely Internet sites that actually describe methods to commit suicide, and that even encourage suicide. So this is what the youngest, most vulnerable individuals may find on the Web when they feel lonely, unhappy, depressed, without support and have thoughts of suicide

Suicide surfers have a greater than average risk to die - beacuse  suicide behaviour  is often impulsive. - An individual may be searching the web for suicide information, but he might just as well be distracted from his self-destructive thoughts.

Dr Keith Harris, University of Queensland, Australia, has investigated more than 1000 suicidale Web surfers. Among these, he identified some 500  ”suicide surfers”.  


Keith Harris says these individuals are contemplating whether they shall die or go on living. When they search the Web for suicide information, they haven´t finally decided. Instead, on the Web they try to find support for either choice.

In Australia, since 2005, there is a law prohibiting pro-active suicide internet sites ( according to the Criminal Code Amendment, Suicide Related Material Offences Act, 2005, No 92).

For persons with suicide thoughts and suicide plans, it is important, together with such a prohibition, to give information on the Internet about where to find help.

If you search the Net for  the word "suicide" you will as one of the first sites find one such positive, helpful site that advises against suicide and demonstrates that there is help to be found ( ”Thinking about suicide? Read this first!”).

The best help that you as a fellow human being can give to a friend, a colleague at work or someone related to you, or someone else with suicide thoughts or plans, is to stop by, to listen, to show that you care, that wou intend to help.

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When you do this, you show, by your behaviour, that the other person is valuable. A person with suicide thoughts or suicide plans has a very low self-confidence - in his own eyes, he isn´t even worthy of living.

If you make a halt, make time and sit down in calm and peace with the other person  ( Lévinas´ The Other One) - then you show that this person is valuable, and that he must not take his life but go on living.


In this way, you become some sort of  lever for the other person, enabling him to get a first tiny bit of self-confidence back. This also means a first step to seek professional help together. 

  During the last 25 years, the number of suicides in Sweden have deminished to almost the half. In 1980,  2243 individals died because of suicide. In 2008, the corresponding figure was 1467.   The Swedish suicide rate has gone down, but:  this is true only for the age groups of 25 years and over.

In the age group  15-24 years, since the early 1990:s,  there is no decrease in the number of suicides in Sweden.

- It is precisely in this age group where you find the biggest use of the Internet.