Investigating A ‘Tweet Suicide’: Real Life Story of Commuinty & Cops Helping To Save A Life #MentalHealth
Responding in a timely way to suicidal social media posts can save lives. Are the proper investments and training in place in 2015? An involved cop wants to further the dialogue! The balance between privacy and safety is often a challenge when talking about mental health issues. Social media adds another layer of complication for privacy advocates. Bottom line for Constable Scott Mills is that human resources, funding and training need to be invested in profession suicide intervention and prevention using social media tools and the dialogue needs to occur. Thanks Andrew for agreeing to let me do this blog post! This post will describe the community and Toronto Police response to a cry for help in social media, in particular on twitter. It is being written because 'we', the community and the police, as well as other stakeholders like paramedics and the health system, social services and the education system need to talk about it to ensure best practices moving forward. The permission to write these facts comes from a man named Andrew Parker himself. The permission was obtained on twitter in a public forum on the tweet embedded below on Monday March 23, 2015. [...]