Facebook suicide memorial pages: Are they in compliance with WHO’s suicide media guidelines?

Abstract

We applied the World Health Organization’s checklist of quality criteria to a sample of 75 Facebook memorial pages for young people aged 15‐25 in Canada and the USA. The most common poor behavior is the publishing of distressing images, something done by 90.7% of analyzed pages. The most common positive behavior was the publicization of suicide risk factors, which was done by only 17.3% of pages. Men and women differed in that men’s pages were more likely to give simplistic reasons for the death (25% vs 8,7%), while the women’s pages were dramatically more likely to report the method of suicide (38.1% vs 17.3%), though these differences were not statistically significant. These results serve to start the conversation around the appropriateness of the content of suicide memorial pages.