#and i feel like the hostility in tumblr reply sections in general might be a part of that

[fudge24-7]

Wondering if tumblr is really good for me

[rainandhotchocolate]

Marbles - Part 3

A/N - Cause Tumblr is being a reeeeeeal piece of work, all my links to previous chapters are on my profile! (defs would recommend ;))). Anyway, sorry this took so long (as per everything I write lelele) but I hope the ending makes up for it... enjoy!

Y/N yawned audibly, trailing her feet as she walked up the stairs to meet Remus. Every Tuesday they had the 10-1am rounds, the last one for the night, as they both had free periods the next morning.

He was already waiting at the top of the stairs under a painting of King Henry VIII being beheaded by his wives.

“You’re late” Remus put down the book he was reading and raised an eyebrow at her.

“You’re correct” Y/N gave him a double thumbs-up yawning again as they set off at a brisk pace around the second-floor corridors.

“So, what are you reading at the moment?”

“Dracula- the muggle fiction book, not the memoir” Remus grinned, holding the cover-up proudly, “They got a surprising amount correct”

“Tell that to my mother” Y/N snorted, taking hold of the book and reading the back cover, “Where did you find this?”

“My muggle studies professor gave it to me, she has a collection of all the classics”

“How close are you to hitting 100?” Y/N asked, picking up some parchment someone had left on the floor outside a spare classroom.

“Getting close!” Remus’ eyes shone excitedly as they always did when Y/N brought up books. Y/N had learnt, over the past few months of working alongside him, that he was obsessed with knowing everything he possibly could, within the realms of fiction and non-fiction books. A few weeks ago, Y/N had given him her copy of Frankenstein she’d snuck into her house from a small London bookstore down the road from Diagon Alley after she’d finished up her school supply shopping. Since then he decided that he would finish 100 muggle books before the end of the year.

“Y/N!” Remus repeated loudly, grabbing her arm and making her wince slightly, “What is that?”

He had twisted her forearm around so her hand was splayed flat, revealing a large, darkening wound, poorly sewn up by Y/N last night.

“It’s nothing”, Y/N pulled away quickly, cursing internally for not covering it better.

“Don’t bullshit me, Y/L/N”

“Ooo, back on last names huh?”

“Y/N”

“I just got into a small fight” Y/N sighed.

“Someone did this to you?” Remus looked appalled, distinctly more worried than before. Y/N felt a little pang in her chest at his concern but forced herself to look away from him, hating how much she loved when he cared.

“Not someone, Snape” Y/N spat, “he wanted to try out a new fun spell on me”

“You have to tell someone! Dumbledore or McGonagall, that is not ok”

“Dumbledore knows what they do” Y/N muttered bitterly. How could he not? First-year muggle-borns were getting bullied so severely they didn’t want to come into the common room until they needed to go to bed, “And anyway he didn’t come off unscathed”

“James and Sirius will be very happy to hear that” Remus chuckled, albeit darkly. Y/N tensed when he said Sirius but shook it off, smiling tightly and continuing to walk down towards the library.

It seemed that Remus had sensed the hostility and dropped the subject. He hadn’t pried into why Sirius and herself had stopped talking. Y/N could only imagine the cruel things Sirius would have said about her.

They walked in silence, mumbling occasionally nox when paintings got mad at them. When they reached the library Remus stopped suddenly, wheeling away from the library door and towards the Great Hall.

“Remus?” Y/N paused out the front of the library, raising her eyebrows at him, “Any reason why you’d not want to go in?”

“Uh, no, I just think-“Remus started, but Y/N cut him off, edging her way back into the Library.

“So, you’ll be totally fine if I just go in and do a quick round? You know, like we’re supposed to every night?”

“If we don’t, we can finish early, and you can go back to sleep?”

“Mmmmhmmmmm” Y/N glared at Remus, infinitely curious as to why he didn’t want to trawl the books at night, practically drooling on them like he normally wanted to. She did, however, have a faint inkling that it might be to do with a certain group of boys who were generally up to no good.

She rounded the corner quickly so that Remus wouldn’t be able to stop her and headed towards the restricted section towards the back of the library, where she could hear whispered voices and feet shuffling along the ground.

She could hear Remus following quickly behind her, but she didn’t stop until she was face to face with someone’s ass. James, Sirius, and Peter had stopped dead. James was standing awkwardly, his arms in the air, hoisting Sirius over his head so he could counter the jinxes set in place to deter the same 3 boys from re-entering the restricted section. Peter was holding a large cloak and several large homemade dungbombs.

They had stopped dead when they’d heard Y/N and Remus’ footsteps, but James’ arms were beginning to shake, and he had to quickly let Sirius down.

“Here to spoil the fun?” Sirius swiped, smirking irritatingly down at her. Y/N had to hold herself back from taking in a deep breath and inhale all the things that used to make her happy – Musky muggle cologne, the smell dogs have when they’re sleepy, and Sleekeazy’s hair potion.

“I do my best” Y/N smiled sweetly, pointing her wand at Peter and levitating the dung bombs out of his arms, “Care to explain”.

“Not particularly”

“Well free dung bombs for me then, what a lucky day”

“We were just going to put them in the worst books – the ones those death consumers, or whatever those wankers call themselves, seem to keep stealing to learn new tricks and terrorise muggle-borns,��� James had stepped between them and was trying to reason with her.

“What’s the point in that?”

“This way we can easily figure out who’s doing it and… convince them otherwise James grinned darkly, “It’s really for a good cause”.

“And what if they are making other, innocent, people do their dirty work for them?”, the boys said nothing, “Of course you didn’t think about that”.

“No point reasoning with her, we know where her allegiances lie” Sirius spoke to James, staring her down with spite swirling in his grey eyes.

“I thought I did” Y/N spat back at him, “These are confiscated, go back to your common room before I decide to report you as well”

The boy stalked away, muttering between themselves bitterly. Remus said nothing as they trailed after them, doing a small sweep of the library before heading back into the now deserted hallways. They finished their round in silence, Remus avoiding eye contact and Y/N was coming up with new and improved comebacks in her head.

“This is you,” Remus said lamely, nodding towards the stairs that lead to the Slytherin Common Room. She gave him a small smile and started walking down the stairs, but Remus called out for her to stop. She turned, sighing and looking up at him.

“Look, for what it’s worth, Sirius never told us why you guys don’t hang out anymore. And I don’t believe this bullshit ‘she’s friends with Mulciber and Lucius’ crap – I’ve seen you hex them more than anyone else in Gryffindor or the school for that matter,” He looked at her with such intensity that she began to feel a little uncomfortable. Remus was good at this, making people feel heard and making people feel like they’ve disappointed him, “I know you can’t have done anything actually wrong, and this feud between you two is getting ridiculous.”

He raised an eyebrow and went to turn but stopped, facing her again.

“He still has all your letters you know. He hid them under his bed, but I’ve seen him get them out every so often – especially when his parents send gift baskets to Regulus. He misses you”.

And with that, he left, leaving Y/N’s heart beating painfully in her chest and tears threaten to fall down her cheeks in front of Slytherin’s dungeon entrance to the common room.

Fuck. Y/N stood motionless for a second, before wandering back into her common room, into her dorm, and into bed in what felt like a daze. She couldn’t sleep. He missed her. Remus SAID he missed her. He can’t miss her, who treats someone they miss like that? And the look in his eyes when he saw her, standing there, wand in hand whilst-

She couldn’t stand it. She jumped back out of bed, grabbed a robe and snuck back outside, moving stealthily through the castle and towards a small secret exit into the front gardens. The cool air hit her sharply, but it calmed her almost instantly, forcing her to take a deep breath in and stand still for a second. She moved slowly through the cobblestone courtyard, moving towards a small bench that looked out over the widespread rolling Scottish countryside.

There was something, just in the corner of her eye, that suddenly made her nervous. She pulled out her wand slowly, not wanting to make a noise, and stood up, moving slowly towards what looked like a large figure, hunched over and leaning on the edge of the balcony that overlooked the castle grounds. It reminded her of Snape, hunch-backed and slimy, and she crept forward, desperately hoping it was him, alone, unprepared for an attack-

“AHhhhhhh!” A voice yelled suddenly, the hunched figure swinging around as she clipped her shoe on a stone underneath her. The figure moved quickly towards her, wand out, and pushed her against a cold stone wall, sticking their wand roughly under her throat.

“Y/N?”

“Sirius?”

“What the fuck are you doing here”

“I could say the same thing” Y/N replied gruffly, feeling the wand prod painfully into her throat. He didn’t move however, he just stared at her, his grey eyes wide-open with shock and… what looked like-

“Were you crying?”

“Fuck off, Y/L/N, don’t pretend to care.” He growled, narrowing his eyes at her. Y/N coughed painfully under his grip.

“Can you please move your wand if you’re not going to kill me at this point in time” Y/N choked out, trying to edge her way out, “please, it hurts”.

Sirius seemed to soften slightly at her words, and lowered his wand, still standing guard.

“Jeez, pretty easy to get you to stand down” Y/N couldn’t help but quip back, already internally frustrated at her pretty terrible peacekeeping abilities.

“More like I don’t quite see you as a threat”

“Difficult to believe that after that scream you made a few seconds ago”

“What, as you snuck up behind me? Getting ready to push me over?” Sirius poked her slightly with his wand, his arm shaking slightly.

“I didn’t know it was you”

“Oh sure, couldn’t wait to get me again, back turned and everything. Like a coward”

“I’m NOT a coward”

“Oh yeah?” Sirius growled again, taunting her, “prove it”.

Without thinking any of her next steps through, she grabbed the back of his long curly hair and kissed him. He kissed her back, grabbing her roughly around her waist and pulling him up to her. Y/N was melting, feeling his lips move against hers and his hands dig into the small of her back and her shoulder blade made her breathing hitch and knees begin to shake. He growled when she dug her fingernails into his scalp slightly and pulled her tighter, pushing his tongue between her lips and flicking it onto hers. She wanted to moan, feeling her way down his chest, leave marks down his shoulders, hips… but the sharp breeze that blew under her jumper pulled her back into reality.

She pulled away suddenly, leaving Sirius with swollen lips and red cheeks, and thoroughly confused.

“I- I’m sorry” She muttered quickly, avoiding his gaze and turning on the spot, running back into the castle before he could get out another word.

General Taglist: @blackpinkdolan @maraudersandco   @cherrie511   @imlukesnirvana @thebabblingbookworm  @blushingskywalker @evyiione @sirius-lysad Marbles taglist: @sophisticatedslytherin @takemetoneverland420  @hufflepeople   @cosmiclunas  @nadinissavage   @sad-slytherinbitch     @localserpent   @dangerouskawaiiharrypotter   @kneazlesgetitdone @oliolioxiclean  @sister-stop   @mcu-potter-pirate   @kath0098   @jeowjungkook  @oh-so-twisted  @ashkuuuu  @unique05sstuff   thatawesomeweirdo00      @green-lxght​ @xsuperwholockaddictx-blog​    @introvertedmegalomaniac   @marlenemckinnontrash  @shrekstolemytoes      @slytherin-batbitch​  

[elftwink]

@linstella tumblr would not let my type a reply in the actual reply section and it won’t let me @ you so hopefully you see this but:

good point! particularly online where you don’t know people it’s easy to assume everyone is out to piss you off (especially because a lot of times, you end up being right). i’d be lying if i said i hadn’t been overly defensive and hostile myself on a variety of topics only to later feel bad for overreacting to someone who was actually trying to engage in good faith (or vice versa, where i gave the time of day to someone who literally could not care less and got annoyed over it because it was so pointless). it’s definitely messier than what i accounted for  in my post and i certainly don’t think anyone should be expected to be patient and helpful about politics in general especially because that expectation rarely goes both ways and i don’t really see the value in encouraging people who are rightfully upset to “be the bigger person” or w/e.

i think what rubs me the wrong way about the current discussions of voting is like... they aren’t really reaching across the aisle, so i don’t understand why a  person would be so openly hostile to people they are supposedly on the “same side” as them, you know? like, the slogan ‘vote blue no matter who’ isn’t really intended for republicans at all, it’s for other democrats. so it seems weird to assume a part of your own base is apathetic or uncaring about politics especially because voting is the bare minimum for political participation and now more than ever a lot of people are realizing that voting every few years just isn’t enough to enact change by itself. and it’s hard to fault some of them for concluding that it’s pointless to vote at all, even though i personally disagree because like. it sure feels that way sometimes! to yell at these people about why they should vote indicates a failure to understand why they’re not voting in the first place

admittedly this next point might be a stretch so correct me if it’s wrong but when you talk about having to have a friend make you register i think that sort of illustrates what i mean maybe? that it’s more effective to address the barriers directly instead of just constantly making a case for why someone should just do it themselves, whether that’s small like giving someone a ride to the polls or big like protesting against voter suppression.

but i definitely think you’re 100% right in that it’s unreasonable and a waste of time to demand endless patience and resources and discussion and that’s a huge contributor to the ways people discuss things on here that i just did not take into account. the environment online is sub-optimal for nuanced political discussion, to put it mildly.

this got so long tl;dr you’re right and i agree and everything else here is just me waffling rip sorry

[nancygduarteus]

Suicide Memes Might Actually Be Therapeutic

In a recent post to the popular meme-sharing platform 9gag, two side-by-side storybook illustrations depict a girl watching snowflakes fall outside her bedroom window. The left panel is titled “kids then”: In a thought bubble, the girl wistfully muses, “I sure hope they cancel school for all this snow.” The right panel is “kids now.” The girl looks at the snow outside and thinks, “I hope a car loses traction on the ice and rams into me and I fucking die tomorrow.”

This is a joke—and apparently a very relatable one for its target demographic, the millions of Generation Y and Z digital natives for whom memes are a mother tongue. A casual scroll on 9gag, which receives 3.5 billion page views a month, will turn up dozens of memes daily about self-harm or wanting to die, and young people are sharing, retweeting, and reblogging similar content across the social-media landscape. You’ll find storybook illustrations doctored to show children dreaming of grisly deaths, Spongebob joyfully flailing to his doom during a bank stickup, and Obama about to throw himself off a bridge.

At first blush, these jokes couldn’t be in poorer taste. The World Health Organization ranks suicide as the second leading cause of death for youth worldwide. In the United States, data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention showed staggering 70 and 77 percent increases in suicide rates of white and black teens, respectively, between 2006 and 2016. In response, public-health officials and tech giants alike have been cracking down on potentially dangerous messaging on self-harm. Last Friday, Instagram rolled out a new policy banning “graphic” depictions of self-harm or suicide.

But memes about suicide remain largely uncharted territory. While disturbing, they’re far less graphic than actual depictions. And they’re often darkly funny. As the gatekeepers of social media are wrestling with how to police this trend, some suicide-prevention experts see a window of opportunity. Typically, suicide memers aren’t mocking suicidal thoughts; they’re commiserating and bonding over being suicidal. Morbid memes, these experts believe, may be a foot in the door to one of the most vulnerable and hard to reach populations: socially isolated young people.

April Foreman is a seasoned veteran of the dark web. As a licensed psychologist and executive board member at the American Association of Suicidology, she’s clicked through the foulest content on the internet to keep tabs on the volatile and high-risk souls that live there.

Foreman wasn’t surprised when suicide memes began to percolate up into the surface-level internet after a long incubation period in more hostile and conspiracy-laden depths (see: 4chan). In a way, she’s heartened by the memes’ increased social acceptability. Like so many anonymous platforms, 9gag struggles with pervasive racism, misogyny, and old-fashion trolling. But while the predictable ‘lol, do it’ replies pepper the comment sections to suicide memes, messages of support tend to be buoyed to the top by hundreds of upvotes. Internet scamps with usernames like necrolovertown gently direct suicide-meme posters to local suicide hotlines (or, in necrolovertown’s case, provide his Facebook contact info and a standing offer to chat—“any hour anytime I’ll be there”).

[Read: Social media is redefining “depression”]

What we’re witnessing on 9gag, Foreman explains, is the writing of a new “social script.” Sometimes it’s tough to know what to say, “like if someone’s dog dies, or if you have to go to a funeral,” she says. But through experience, communities develop a formula for how to respond supportively, something like, “Dude, that’s rough. I’ve gone through it. Here are the resources, let me know if you need support.” Foreman has identified several corners of the internet that seem to have healthy social scripts for suicidal thoughts. “Reddit communities around certain video games”—like the Eve Online universe’s Broadcast 4 Reps–“tend to have communities where you talk about your mental health and you feel better. People help you.”

Still, Foreman cautions, destructive conversations about suicide abound deeper in the bowels of the internet. “We have people that go in there as trolls to really stir people up and make them feel worse,” she says. They make “‘sui-fuel,’ memes to get people even more depressed, with the idea that you might ‘rope’—which is kill yourself—or you might even go and do a murder-suicide.”

Foreman’s colleague Bart Andrews, another clinical psychologist and executive board member at the AAS, is a full-throated advocate for suicide memes as an alternative to these destructive depths. Andrews bucks the traditional wisdom on suicide contagion, the idea that suicidal thoughts can spread through a community like a virus. It’s an evidence-based notion that’s been widely unchallenged for decades, and informs national and international guidelines for media coverage of suicide. Andrews acknowledges that irresponsible reporting of suicide—such as sensationalistic, needlessly graphic descriptions of celebrity suicide—likely has population-level effects. But if safe-messaging guidelines prevent people from having meaningful conversations, Andrews contends, they can be deadly.

“The very people we’re trying to reach, the youth—we’re telling them they can’t talk about suicide the way they talk about it,” Andrews says. “When you read the threads on these memes, people find them helpful. They don’t feel alone. It’s a way for them to anonymously communicate their inner pain in a way that’s artistic, super clever, and that people who are struggling identify with.”

Andrews believes that decades of an effective “gag rule” on suicide stifled conversation and perpetuated stigma—and that while the younger generations are more willing to talk, there’s still a vestigial wariness among listeners that the very act of discussing suicide could make their friends worse. He rattles off a list of memes formats that emphasize hope or resilience. Perennial favorites are “not today, old friend,” where Moe from The Simpsons decides not to kill himself, and “my mom would be sad.” “They get at reasons for living,” Andrews says. “And those can be really small.”

Another camp of suicide-prevention experts prefer to err on the side of caution. Jane Pirkis, the director of the center for mental health at the University of Melbourne and an expert on suicide-contagion theory, is the traditionalist yin to Andrews’ laissez-faire yang when it comes to safe messaging. “I wouldn’t say I’m alarmed, but I don’t think it’s very good,” she told me after reviewing a handful of 9gag memes. “The work we’ve done looking at traditional media definitely shows that representation that normalizes suicide or glorifies it at all can lead to so-called copycat acts.”

Pirkis concedes that the bulk of the scientific literature on contagion came from the pre-internet age, but she insists those lessons carry into social media. “They’re very basic, Psychology 101 principles about modeling behavior, and people learning what’s normal, what’s likely to get a response,” she says. “That’s why you don’t see depictions of smoking in film and television any more.”

This conversation around suicide memes is complicated by a generation gap between suicide-prevention experts and the communities they serve. I talked to several mental-health experts who were well beyond the age of the average memer and entirely unaware that suicide memes exist. Once they recovered from the initial surprise at this undercurrent of dark humor, however, they warmed to the idea that memes about suicide could have a capacity to heal.

These experts emphasize that it’s a fine line between destigmatizing suicidal thoughts and normalizing them. The right messages can let people know they’re not alone and that it’s okay to reach out for help. But overexposure could, in theory, lead to the belief that thoughts about self-harm are normal and not a cause for concern. Further muddying the waters, the very meme that could inspire one teen to call a psychiatrist could dredge up painful memories of a prior attempt in someone else.

There’s a dearth of experimental research on how people respond to non-graphic content about suicide, so social-media platforms are left to cobble together their own policies through high-stakes trial and error. The changes to Instagram’s self-harm policy last week, for instance, were reportedly spurred by the death of a 14-year-old in the United Kingdom Most social-media outlets draw the line at text, image, and video that appear to encourage suicide or self-harm. Facebook, Tumblr, and Instagram have “hot words” associated with self-harm that automatically trigger messages to users about mental health and links to the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline, a network of crisis hotlines that offer free counseling around the clock. But since image-based memes are hard for AI to parse, platforms generally rely on users to report sensitive material that isn’t simply text-based.

Foreman points to Tumblr as a platform that’s getting it right. Tumblr partners with mental-health advocacy groups, like the Suicide Prevention Lifeline and National Alliance on Mental Health, and reviews every post reported with the “self-harm” flag, according to Victoria McCullough, the company’s head of social impact and public policy. Depending on the post itself and its reception by the community, Tumblr might remove abusive responses, remove the post itself, or refer the creator to additional mental-health resources. McCullough says the company is very cautious about removing content altogether for fear of “undermining those recovery conversations.”

[Read: Tumblr has a cutting (and an anorexia and bulimia) problem]

9gag only added a tag specific to self-harm in the past several months. “Personally, I don’t think any community can claim that users’ comments are 100% positive at all times. There’s no such thing in life either. LOL,” 9gag’s COO Lilian Leong told me over email. “Of course, we can always level up our filtering measures. But we are very cautious not to get over-engineered and overkilled.”

Unlike Facebook and Twitter, 9gag is a single-scroll platform; regardless of a user’s previous activity on the site, everyone sees the same grab bag of memes. What’s on the ‘hot’ and ‘trending’ pages is determined by users’ upvotes and any editorial choices 9gag makes. Leong did not respond to questions about specific curation decisions—like why users couldn’t search the tag “suicide,” but could search “kill myself” and “suicidal”—or describe the decision-making process behind the removal of a sensitive post. In the days following our exchange, however, 9gag plugged all the holes in its search system pertaining to self-harm.

At the end of my reporting for this story, I posted on 9gag asking users to talk about their experience with memes about suicide. You can see the full threads here and here. The replies were a case study of what happens when a diverse community is left all-but-unsupervised in their reactions to suicide memes.

Some users like dracothedragon told me to “F.O.A.D.”—or “fuck off and die.” But most shared stories about how suicide memes sparked feelings of belonging amid isolation. @angry_doge42 said, “I tried so hard to gather the courage to end it. But I remember this post about how this random dude from the other side of the planet turned his life around after surviving the attempt and was now doing his own thing (I think, making candles). Gave up trying to knock myself haha. You guys maybe pricks but most of y’all are awesome.”

@streethastle wasn’t going to let me off easy: “You’re going to set people up with false hope if you’re really going to pull through with a naive article filled with cherry picked examples of ‘supportive’ comments. This website is a fucking cesspool of social degenerates.” But @infexo rushed to my aid. “I don’t see any harm in shedding light on the positive side of 9gag, because like it or not, it does exist ... And a few lines coming out from a caring heart can change drastically a [tragic] act.”

Pirkis, the University of Melbourne mental-health expert, agreed with @infexo, saying it’s a deadly myth that only professionals can help people at risk of suicide. “This great unwashed population that we’re talking about has a role to play,” she says.

Foreman and her colleagues at the American Association of Suicidology look forward to seeing the dialogue expand around suicide memes, however inelegantly. “I’ve never known a single problem that got better by not talking about it,” Foreman says. “Not a single public health problem has gotten better by reducing conversation.”

from Health News And Updates https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2019/02/suicide-memes/582832/?utm_source=feed

[ionecoffman]

Suicide Memes Might Actually Be Therapeutic

In a recent post to the popular meme-sharing platform 9gag, two side-by-side storybook illustrations depict a girl watching snowflakes fall outside her bedroom window. The left panel is titled “kids then”: In a thought bubble, the girl wistfully muses, “I sure hope they cancel school for all this snow.” The right panel is “kids now.” The girl looks at the snow outside and thinks, “I hope a car loses traction on the ice and rams into me and I fucking die tomorrow.”

This is a joke—and apparently a very relatable one for its target demographic, the millions of Generation Y and Z digital natives for whom memes are a mother tongue. A casual scroll on 9gag, which receives 3.5 billion page views a month, will turn up dozens of memes daily about self-harm or wanting to die, and young people are sharing, retweeting, and reblogging similar content across the social-media landscape. You’ll find storybook illustrations doctored to show children dreaming of grisly deaths, Spongebob joyfully flailing to his doom during a bank stickup, and Obama about to throw himself off a bridge.

At first blush, these jokes couldn’t be in poorer taste. The World Health Organization ranks suicide as the second leading cause of death for youth worldwide. In the United States, data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention showed staggering 70 and 77 percent increases in suicide rates of white and black teens, respectively, between 2006 and 2016. In response, public-health officials and tech giants alike have been cracking down on potentially dangerous messaging on self-harm. Last Friday, Instagram rolled out a new policy banning “graphic” depictions of self-harm or suicide.

But memes about suicide remain largely uncharted territory. While disturbing, they’re far less graphic than actual depictions. And they’re often darkly funny. As the gatekeepers of social media are wrestling with how to police this trend, some suicide-prevention experts see a window of opportunity. Typically, suicide memers aren’t mocking suicidal thoughts; they’re commiserating and bonding over being suicidal. Morbid memes, these experts believe, may be a foot in the door to one of the most vulnerable and hard to reach populations: socially isolated young people.

April Foreman is a seasoned veteran of the dark web. As a licensed psychologist and executive board member at the American Association of Suicidology, she’s clicked through the foulest content on the internet to keep tabs on the volatile and high-risk souls that live there.

Foreman wasn’t surprised when suicide memes began to percolate up into the surface-level internet after a long incubation period in more hostile and conspiracy-laden depths (see: 4chan). In a way, she’s heartened by the memes’ increased social acceptability. Like so many anonymous platforms, 9gag struggles with pervasive racism, misogyny, and old-fashion trolling. But while the predictable ‘lol, do it’ replies pepper the comment sections to suicide memes, messages of support tend to be buoyed to the top by hundreds of upvotes. Internet scamps with usernames like necrolovertown gently direct suicide-meme posters to local suicide hotlines (or, in necrolovertown’s case, provide his Facebook contact info and a standing offer to chat—“any hour anytime I’ll be there”).

[Read: Social media is redefining “depression”]

What we’re witnessing on 9gag, Foreman explains, is the writing of a new “social script.” Sometimes it’s tough to know what to say, “like if someone’s dog dies, or if you have to go to a funeral,” she says. But through experience, communities develop a formula for how to respond supportively, something like, “Dude, that’s rough. I’ve gone through it. Here are the resources, let me know if you need support.” Foreman has identified several corners of the internet that seem to have healthy social scripts for suicidal thoughts. “Reddit communities around certain video games”—like the Eve Online universe’s Broadcast 4 Reps–“tend to have communities where you talk about your mental health and you feel better. People help you.”

Still, Foreman cautions, destructive conversations about suicide abound deeper in the bowels of the internet. “We have people that go in there as trolls to really stir people up and make them feel worse,” she says. They make “‘sui-fuel,’ memes to get people even more depressed, with the idea that you might ‘rope’—which is kill yourself—or you might even go and do a murder-suicide.”

Foreman’s colleague Bart Andrews, another clinical psychologist and executive board member at the AAS, is a full-throated advocate for suicide memes as an alternative to these destructive depths. Andrews bucks the traditional wisdom on suicide contagion, the idea that suicidal thoughts can spread through a community like a virus. It’s an evidence-based notion that’s been widely unchallenged for decades, and informs national and international guidelines for media coverage of suicide. Andrews acknowledges that irresponsible reporting of suicide—such as sensationalistic, needlessly graphic descriptions of celebrity suicide—likely has population-level effects. But if safe-messaging guidelines prevent people from having meaningful conversations, Andrews contends, they can be deadly.

“The very people we’re trying to reach, the youth—we’re telling them they can’t talk about suicide the way they talk about it,” Andrews says. “When you read the threads on these memes, people find them helpful. They don’t feel alone. It’s a way for them to anonymously communicate their inner pain in a way that’s artistic, super clever, and that people who are struggling identify with.”

Andrews believes that decades of an effective “gag rule” on suicide stifled conversation and perpetuated stigma—and that while the younger generations are more willing to talk, there’s still a vestigial wariness among listeners that the very act of discussing suicide could make their friends worse. He rattles off a list of memes formats that emphasize hope or resilience. Perennial favorites are “not today, old friend,” where Moe from The Simpsons decides not to kill himself, and “my mom would be sad.” “They get at reasons for living,” Andrews says. “And those can be really small.”

Another camp of suicide-prevention experts prefer to err on the side of caution. Jane Pirkis, the director of the center for mental health at the University of Melbourne and an expert on suicide-contagion theory, is the traditionalist yin to Andrews’ laissez-faire yang when it comes to safe messaging. “I wouldn’t say I’m alarmed, but I don’t think it’s very good,” she told me after reviewing a handful of 9gag memes. “The work we’ve done looking at traditional media definitely shows that representation that normalizes suicide or glorifies it at all can lead to so-called copycat acts.”

Pirkis concedes that the bulk of the scientific literature on contagion came from the pre-internet age, but she insists those lessons carry into social media. “They’re very basic, Psychology 101 principles about modeling behavior, and people learning what’s normal, what’s likely to get a response,” she says. “That’s why you don’t see depictions of smoking in film and television any more.”

This conversation around suicide memes is complicated by a generation gap between suicide-prevention experts and the communities they serve. I talked to several mental-health experts who were well beyond the age of the average memer and entirely unaware that suicide memes exist. Once they recovered from the initial surprise at this undercurrent of dark humor, however, they warmed to the idea that memes about suicide could have a capacity to heal.

These experts emphasize that it’s a fine line between destigmatizing suicidal thoughts and normalizing them. The right messages can let people know they’re not alone and that it’s okay to reach out for help. But overexposure could, in theory, lead to the belief that thoughts about self-harm are normal and not a cause for concern. Further muddying the waters, the very meme that could inspire one teen to call a psychiatrist could dredge up painful memories of a prior attempt in someone else.

There’s a dearth of experimental research on how people respond to non-graphic content about suicide, so social-media platforms are left to cobble together their own policies through high-stakes trial and error. The changes to Instagram’s self-harm policy last week, for instance, were reportedly spurred by the death of a 14-year-old in the United Kingdom Most social-media outlets draw the line at text, image, and video that appear to encourage suicide or self-harm. Facebook, Tumblr, and Instagram have “hot words” associated with self-harm that automatically trigger messages to users about mental health and links to the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline, a network of crisis hotlines that offer free counseling around the clock. But since image-based memes are hard for AI to parse, platforms generally rely on users to report sensitive material that isn’t simply text-based.

Foreman points to Tumblr as a platform that’s getting it right. Tumblr partners with mental-health advocacy groups, like the Suicide Prevention Lifeline and National Alliance on Mental Health, and reviews every post reported with the “self-harm” flag, according to Victoria McCullough, the company’s head of social impact and public policy. Depending on the post itself and its reception by the community, Tumblr might remove abusive responses, remove the post itself, or refer the creator to additional mental-health resources. McCullough says the company is very cautious about removing content altogether for fear of “undermining those recovery conversations.”

[Read: Tumblr has a cutting (and an anorexia and bulimia) problem]

9gag only added a tag specific to self-harm in the past several months. “Personally, I don’t think any community can claim that users’ comments are 100% positive at all times. There’s no such thing in life either. LOL,” 9gag’s COO Lilian Leong told me over email. “Of course, we can always level up our filtering measures. But we are very cautious not to get over-engineered and overkilled.”

Unlike Facebook and Twitter, 9gag is a single-scroll platform; regardless of a user’s previous activity on the site, everyone sees the same grab bag of memes. What’s on the ‘hot’ and ‘trending’ pages is determined by users’ upvotes and any editorial choices 9gag makes. Leong did not respond to questions about specific curation decisions—like why users couldn’t search the tag “suicide,” but could search “kill myself” and “suicidal”—or describe the decision-making process behind the removal of a sensitive post. In the days following our exchange, however, 9gag plugged all the holes in its search system pertaining to self-harm.

At the end of my reporting for this story, I posted on 9gag asking users to talk about their experience with memes about suicide. You can see the full threads here and here. The replies were a case study of what happens when a diverse community is left all-but-unsupervised in their reactions to suicide memes.

Some users like dracothedragon told me to “F.O.A.D.”—or “fuck off and die.” But most shared stories about how suicide memes sparked feelings of belonging amid isolation. @angry_doge42 said, “I tried so hard to gather the courage to end it. But I remember this post about how this random dude from the other side of the planet turned his life around after surviving the attempt and was now doing his own thing (I think, making candles). Gave up trying to knock myself haha. You guys maybe pricks but most of y’all are awesome.”

@streethastle wasn’t going to let me off easy: “You’re going to set people up with false hope if you’re really going to pull through with a naive article filled with cherry picked examples of ‘supportive’ comments. This website is a fucking cesspool of social degenerates.” But @infexo rushed to my aid. “I don’t see any harm in shedding light on the positive side of 9gag, because like it or not, it does exist ... And a few lines coming out from a caring heart can change drastically a [tragic] act.”

Pirkis, the University of Melbourne mental-health expert, agreed with @infexo, saying it’s a deadly myth that only professionals can help people at risk of suicide. “This great unwashed population that we’re talking about has a role to play,” she says.

Foreman and her colleagues at the American Association of Suicidology look forward to seeing the dialogue expand around suicide memes, however inelegantly. “I’ve never known a single problem that got better by not talking about it,” Foreman says. “Not a single public health problem has gotten better by reducing conversation.”

Article source here:The Atlantic