Can scientists predict a suicide from Facebook statuses?

Suicide and self-harm indicators may be threaded throughout our social media actions and interactions.

Casey Johnston

Can your Facebook friends predict from your status updates that you’re contemplating suicide? A new study purports to find out whether it's possible by collecting data from a number of volunteer social media and mobile phone users to create a tool for real-time analysis of suicide risk factors.

The experiment is named for Emile Durkheim, a sociologist who conducted a broad survey and analysis of suicide statistics in 1897. In his book, Suicide, Durkheim classified suicide victims into distinct types and found correlations between the lives they led and the likelihood they had to kill themselves.

The Durkheim Project’s participants are drawn from a number of US military veterans. The data collection will rely several apps “available on Facebook as well as for iPhone and Android devices” that will forward the actions and content of participants’ mobile activity—from tweets to LinkedIn interactions to text message content—to a medical database.