Police Psychology:  Suicide Challenges

by Gary S. Aumiller, Ph.D.  ABPP

It’s just an image on a App.  They used a Japanese doll artist’s rendition of a horror figure, a girl that supposedly killed herself and is apparently haunting those who live.  Ah, who knows.  What is more important is she contacts young persons on the internet and asks them to download her.   Then she gives them instructions over the course of their interactions trying to gain information about them, or their parents, or do a variety of dangerous self-harm tasks, she makes bullying threats, shames them, then talks them into killing themselves.  It’s called the “MOMO SUICIDE CHALLENGE.”  Mostly ‘tweens and young teenagers play with her online.  My 11-year old knows about it.  Her friends do.  Most parents do not.  Many cops do not, YET!

The Blue Whale Hoax started in Russia.  It was the same sort of thing, a person interrupts you from Facebook or some other App and asks you to join them by giving them your phone number or by connecting as friends.  Then they slowly give you directions, Blue Whale had over 50 posts fed to you once a day, ending in asking you to kill yourself.  People have tied this to suicides around the world, but no one has evidence of a direct causal element.  Asking pre-teen kids to kill themselves – does it get any sicker than this?

Unfortunately, this is the start of the newest trend on the internet.  It is an international trend and comes in many shapes and sizes.  For a while, kids all over were worried about the 3 am witching hour and waking up at 3 am.  They started with talking kids out of the houses and to meet them somewhere, now they want to tell them to kill themselves.  Sickness and perversion knows no limits.  And although most kids consider it just a fantasy, some don’t.  Some look up their parent’s financial information and give it out, or give out their address, or a phone number so they can have their house looked up when they are alone.  Some got in cars and ended up in a drainage ditch somewhere in another county.  Now, some will kill themselves in their homes while the parents are thinking they are in their rooms playing Minecraft.

What possible thrill could someone get from making a 6^th grader kill themselves?  What causes someone to be so sick and perverted?   Remember, go back to my principle of “no unitary cause of mass behavior.”  There really isn’t a unitary cause for this behavior in every person out there.  I sit in my office suite sometimes and listen to the people yelling and fighting with each other in some of the marital therapy rooms, and I think couldn’t listen to that all day, everyday.  (I don’t allow people to fight in my therapy office.)  Some kids grow up listening to that 24-7.  I go on the street and I see people treat each other with extreme disrespect over something as simple as a parking spot.  I hear Hollywood stars suggesting violence is the way to take their protests to the next level, or protests taking down a statue that get people run over.  I see on TV people in black hoods destroying businesses that someone had worked their life to establish over a sign on the door supporting a political candidate or a decision by a court.  Do those people just walk?  Many times!  We are the aggregate of experience in our lives and if we see people “get away with” causing damage to others, and we haven’t had such a good upbringing ourselves, maybe the leap to causing anonymous pain is not so far.  So, discussing how people go down the path to hurting the innocent may not be fruitful.

So, how do we stop it?!  In Russia they found the guy who started the Blue Whale Hoax.  They had a major dragnet and advertised when he was caught.  He may not see the light of day again.  We have to be more willing to lay down hard punishments and take people out of society who want to hurt others.  We have lost our news channels to report what is going on in the world.  They are either a bunch of slanted opinions or the disaster news using hyperbole more that good solid reporting.  We need the news back to warn us of those things that can hurt our kids.  I don’t mean to advertise, but Snopes did wonders for exposing “Urban Myths.”  These challenges are just Urban Myths that spread on the internet.  We need to find a Snopes for ridiculous and dangerous challenges.

First, we have to talk to our kids and tell them about these things.  Exposure of their ridiculous nature is essential.  We need to have fliers in school and the old internet needs to be used to expose these hoaxes as hoaxes.  Some worry that by telling kids about it we are spreading the rumor, but that is a wrong way of thinking.  Spread the word that anyone found with these needs to be exposed and told about.  The message gets out.

The second step is to have parents monitor kid device usage better.  I am working on a project to do just that which should be released next year.  We have to know what our kids have on the screens in front of them.

Finally, we need to stop the perpetrators of these type of challenges and let them know they went too far with very high punishments.  A person asking kids to kill themselves doesn’t belong in the real world, period.

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