Role of social media is evident in social conflicts

A person dies from suicide every 18 minutes in the United States, according to the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention.   

The IU Student Association released a video Dec. 4, 2011, discussing issues ranging from student suicide to coping with emotional issues.

The video was released in two parts. The first featured individuals speaking about utilizing campus resources and recognizing warning signs.

“Research tells us that students value the opinion of other students and referral of other students almost more than the opinions of any other sources,” Nancy Stockton, director of Counseling and Psychological Services at the IU Health Center, told the
Indiana Daily Student in November.

Similarly, a YouTube video featuring a boy speaking against suicide and self-mutilation has gained viral notability after its August release.

Certain users throughout the online community have questioned the validity of the video, and 14-year-old Jonah Mowry has defended himself and the video, staying true to his original message.

Mowry introduced himself to an audience of what would become more than 8 million viewers.

“I look happy, right?” Mowry wrote to his Web audience via a notecard and marker. “Well, I’m not. What you all see is the fake me.”

Mowry composed the four-minute, 36-second video in the early hours of the morning only a week before the start of this school year.

The eighth-grader now openly identifies with his homosexual orientation.

Mowry said he struggled with his sexuality. Only his closest friends knew about his sexual orientation at the time the video was made. Mowry was previously victimized by
his peers.

IU students, along with other students across the country, began sharing the video through their social media accounts the first week of December.

“I was surprised so many people cared about it,” freshman Elizabeth Gant said. “I guess the people that shared it on my Facebook were the kind of people I would have expected to actually be doing the bullying, but they were serious — they honestly cared.”

Behind a set of glassy, watering eyes, sometimes turning away from direct view of the camera to regain composure, Mowry confessed to his audience that he had contemplated suicide on more than one occasion and that the first time he cut himself was as a second-grader.

“I didn’t know how to say what I needed to say,” Mowry said in a recent written statement to his viewers.

“All I could think about were all the bad things that had been happening at school last year, every year, for that matter. I just couldn’t bear to go through that anymore.”

John McIntosh, professor of psychology at IU-South Bend, said in a press release that there are a number of widely believed but inaccurate assumptions, such as “how often it occurs, who dies of suicide, signs of risk for suicidal behavior and the myth of the suicide note.”

McIntosh spoke in regard to the impact social media have on the reception of these particular social issues and how they affect the ways people actually feel about these situations.

“From everything we know, there are so many listservs, websites, chat rooms (and currently existing social media sites) that are developing subareas for people who are suicidal, for that matter, (and) utilizing them to find out and make contact with other people with these cases,” McIntosh said.

“People are going to use social media, because that’s what they’re using to find out about the world.”

Social networking sites gain new members by the day.

“We know those things are already rapidly expanding, and large numbers of people are using them,” McIntosh said.

McIntosh said the expansion of these social media sites, in terms of both their users and how much they are accessed, is a factor in how comprehensive the information comes across as.

“We’ve learned to try and expand and use whatever areas we think are important. We need to be flexible and open enough to move in the directions we see the social media going,” McIntosh said.

McIntosh said social agencies and other kinds of organizations will try to keep pace with how people are communicating and utilizing the organizations.

“They’re always one step behind,” he said.