Zhu Tingshao analyzes users' Weibo posts to identify whether they have suicidal tendencies and need help. (Photo/Courtesy of Zhu Tingshao)
○ Due to a lack of professional therapists, the country's collectivist mindset and culture of moderation, many depressed Chinese find it hard to talk to psychologists in the real world.
○ Professor Zhu Tingshao and his team of volunteers are trying to help those showing suicidal signs on social media platforms.
"It will all be worth it if we are able to save a single life."
That's the motto of Professor Zhu Tingshao and his team of academic volunteers from the Institute of Psychology under the Chinese Academy of Sciences, who are reaching out online to strangers they think are suffering from depression to offer them someone to talk to, in the hope that they can do their part to solve China's suicide problem.
Carefully going through Sina Weibo posts that show signs of being authored by depressed people, Zhu and the other volunteers, sitting in silence behind screens, are ready to give a hand to anyone who hints they may want to end their lives.
"People send signals if they write about killing themselves, looking for guns or hazardous pills, or regularly post content related to death and suicide," Zhu said.
A total of 6,000 Weibo posts and comments are analyzed by Zhu and his team every week, about 400 of which are identified as showing clear signs of suicidal intent.
The team, the first of its kind in the world, is in many ways a response to China's specific mental health problems: the growth in the number of people suffering from mental problems, the lack of qualified mental health professionals and people's lack of understanding about mental health issues.
Gathering place
Inspired by stories of people who committed suicide after posting about the topic repeatedly on their social media accounts, the team set out to develop a new counseling format.
The project enables psychologists to find and connect with people showing signs of being suicidal and offer them help, while traditionally patients or those around them have to seek help from psychologists.
The team's diagnoses are based on Weibo users' posts, which they say can tell them more about what is going on in a person's head than a traditional psychological survey. In such surveys, people are asked questions such as how regularly they feel depressed, contemplate suicide or self-harm.
"Chinese people tend to fill in the survey with middling responses because of China's collectivist mindset and culture of moderation. This means they rarely choose extreme options," Li Tonggui, a professor at Peking University's School of Psychological and Cognitive Sciences said. "But their posts on Weibo are usually written without conscious intent."
A user, named "fan" was one of many people on Weibo who expressed their despair and suicidal thoughts on their account before ending their lives.
"I have depression, so I've decided to go. It's not a big deal. You shall not be concerned about my leaving. Bye."
This is the last post that "fan" wrote before she committed suicide on March 9, 2012.
She had long been suffering from depression, which can be seen in posts dating back to 2010.
Many other users suffering from depression have congregated around fan's last post, expressing their own thoughts and troubles, even pretending to chat with fan.
The post has become a place for people to share their sadness, receiving more than 693,000 comments so far.
According to Zhu, a large proportion of the comments under these posts show the signs of suicidal tendencies. These comments offer a way for the team to identify people and offer help to them through social media.
People who have similar experiences tend to want to gather together to alleviate their depression and anxiety by pouring their hearts out to people who understand. However in self-centered modern society it's difficult to find people who will lend you their ear, he said.
