JMIR Publications

ABSTRACT

Background:

Suicide is a serious public health concern in Indonesia. Suicide often starts with suicide ideation, considered the most significant factor leading to suicide. Suicidal ideation is often shown on Twitter/X as one of the most popular social media in Indonesia. Interaction in social media could affect individual responses and emotions about suicide.

Objective:

This research aims to understand the expression of suicidal ideation and intention to commit suicide among users of Twitter/X in Indonesia. The first study focused on analyzing the content of suicide-related tweets. The second study focused on exploring purposes, motives, desire, and plan to commit suicide among the users.

Methods:

This research was conducted in two parts. The first part was a content analysis of expressions of suicide ideation among users of Twitter/X in Indonesia. Content analysis was done by Twitter data harvest and MAXQDA. The tweets were filtered out with exclusion and coding by researchers. The second part aimed to obtain a deeper understanding of intention and motivation to express suicide ideation by using five open-ended questions and Suicide Ideation Scale. The analysis was done by thematic analysis (qualitative) and descriptive statistics (quantitative).

Results:

From the 512 tweets collected in the first study, several topics were also expressed along with suicide ideas, such as: relation, financial and academic problems, tiredness and loneliness, expression of negative emotions, hesitations, and pain. From the 34 tweets collected in the second study, five themes were found, such as: purposes and reasons for tweeting, emotions after tweeting, expectations about responses, and help-seeking intentions. The result shows that intention to commit suicide among the users is quite high, with mean score 32.8 out of 50 as maximum score. The desire to commit suicide is higher (mean score 14.1 out of maximum score 20) than the plan and preparation to commit suicide (mean score 15 out of maximum score 25).

Conclusions:

Eventhough the results show that desire to commit suicide is higher than the plan to commit suicide, suicidal ideation tweets should not be underestimated. Suicidal ideation tweets can be seen as means to vent negative emotions, seek attention, support and help. The users also speaks about depression, physical and emotional pain, loneliness and other life problems, revealing the reasons behind their suicidal tweets. Social media-based intervention, such as chatbot and psychoeducation campaigns can be considered as alternatives for intervention to prevent escalation from desire and planning to the act of committing suicide itself. Clinical Trial: -