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Some people reach out for help online because they are unable to do it in real life. Someone could look totally put-together in real life even while planning their suicide, so you can't assume that people in his real life knew what was going on. Even if they had, there's only so much they can do. The police and mental health care professionals aren't allowed to forcibly intervene unless the person is demonstrably at risk of harming himself or others. Even then, all they can do is commit him for a few days, which is hardly a long-term solution. Therapy and medication can help, but they aren't available to everyone, it takes time for figure out the exact combination that'll make a difference and even more time for them to kick in, and they don't work for everybody. There's only so much you can do for someone even if they're willing to admit they're suicidal--which they don't usually do until it's verging on too late to help them. This doesn't mean that I think you shouldn't try, but you also can't blame yourself if it doesn't work.
That said, I don't think that you can blame the people who were egging him on, either. Although it's disturbing, my guess is that the majority of them thought they were watching some elaborate staged prank--fake suicides on the internet outnumber the real ones 10,000 to 1. The internet has taught most people to be skeptical of what they're seeing or hearing, because it's so easy to fake things. At the same time, I get scared because I feel like the internet makes it so easy to dehumanize people, to harass or provoke them in ways where you don't have to watch them get hurt afterward. Cases like this don't scare me nearly as much as the ones where, for example, 4chan decided to make harassing phone calls to the parents of a teenager who killed himself, so much so that they had to change their phone number. At least in the case mentioned above, people have the excuse that they didn't necessarily think it was real. In the 4chan case, they knew it was real, that they were hurting real people who were grieving, and they didn't care. Those are the kind of cases that scare me.
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Hybrid Mode
