Social Media & Suicide: What Would You Do If You Saw Your Friend Plotting Her Suicide On Instagram?

“Do you know that there is a bird without feet? His life can only fly in the sky, flying tired to sleep in the wind, landing only once a lifetime, and that is when he died.”

A Chinese woman who Instagrams under the name jojostai1012 recently shared photos of herself with devastating captions, leading her 65,000 plus followers to assume that she’d attempted suicide on Instagram. TheGloss reported that this could be a hoax, but even if it is, there’s a bigger conversation to be had. With social media becoming something like an online diary, what can we do to help support the people who use it as a cry for help?

 

This woman has still not been identified, but a neighbor has confirmed her death. The woman’s increasingly sad emotions seemed to have stemmed from her failed relationship. These are the translated captions to a few of her photos from the last two weeks:

“It turned out that a few days I do all the nightmares are true, I dreamed that things are really happened, but was too ignorant to be hiding, everything is too slow in responding, I have not done anything in this life bad thing, why should I suffer like torture, very hard these days to live, let yourself forget it all, do not want to control emotions in every middle of the night crying, but I can not, I can not, all right are unfair to me, I can not afford.
After I die, will the night wrapped around you, I’ll never leave you.
Husband, Daddy, my prince, until the next life, you must honor your promise to marry me, can not afford to go back, oh.
He said before that if his mother doesn’t agree to us getting married, he will date [remain as a couple] with me forever, getting married when we are old. This really is the most romantic words of love I’ve ever heard in my life, but it was also a lie. All of this I cannot forget, can never forget, unless I die.”

And then she posted a photo of her significant other, with this caption: “I never thought that you’d deceive me. But I still love you,” before posting three of the most disturbing photos on her timeline. Two of them are photos of her burning things on her bed (below), saying, “Let it burn, all the things like ashes float away.”

 She may have been burning the things she received from her deceiving lover or she could have been burning anything that made her remember him, but one thing is certain–there’s something that this woman wanted to rid herself of, so she burned it.



One of the final photos was of her dangling feet from the side of a building, without a caption. This is the photo that is being reported as suicide:

 
Apparently, the woman’s Instagram photos have been telling her tragic love story for weeks. One of her followers offered this explanation on one of her photos:

Resuming all the situation. She loved this guy, and she was kinda really possessive and loved him so much, but he didn’t love her in the same way. They broke up, she got depressive and couldn’t live without him anymore, burned the stuffs that he gave to her and killed herself. You can translate the old pictures, she basically tell the entire story of them!

This is a terribly sad story and opens up the conversation about social media as a way to cry for help. Millions of people in the world are on social media and it’s obvious that the face of it is changing. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and more has been the virtual venue for people to share each and every detail of their lives, usually the best parts that are easier to brag about. Over the years, social media, no matter how public, has become a virtual diary for many people to log on and spill their guts.
With stories like late Hampton grad, Yuself Neville sharing his last message to the world on Instagram before killing himself and Merrick McKoy, who took a photo with his adorable daughter and shared it on Facebook before killing her and himself; we’re obviously living in a disturbingly digital world. Violent crimes and suicides are being broadcast via social media and while we’re rocked by the imagery and the magnitude of the share; we’re also often desensitized to the extreme nature of these people’s actions. And moving on in the blink of an eye isn’t uncommon.
Beyond being one of the hundreds of commenters (because these things often go viral), what actions can we take to help?