We Can Change

This is my first posting on my blog and I wanted to share with you an article that I read recently about a teen who overdosed on pills while a webcam followed his every move live over the Internet.
This young 19 year old, Abraham Biggs, had written that he was in love with a girl and he posted a suicide note saying that he did not feel worthy of her and he stated that "My life has all been meaningless". Then , a webcam caught him swallowing a handful of pills. He then lay down on his bed while the overdose of benzodiazipines and opiates worked their way through his system. He was apparently taking medication to treat his bipolar disorder. This college student was found dead 12 hours later after first posting his suicide note.
What is so distressing about this incident is that approximately 1,500 people tuned in to watch this event unfold. In fact, many people wrote to Abraham as he lay dying, saying things like "Stop giving the attention whore what he wanted". Finally someone called into the website's moderator and the police were called, but it was too late. Apparently Abraham had tried to kill himself before and so many people on line believed that he was crying wolf and did nothing to intervene.
I remember as a young and naive Psychology major studying a phenonmenon known as 'bystander apathy". To study this issue, graduate students conducted experiments where they had a man fall over on a busy downtown street and pretend to be dying. The experiementers' results indicated that everyone simply walked over the man or walked around the man and no-one stopped to help the man in distress. The reasons that people cited for not stopping to help the 'dying' man was they did not want to get involved because they may be blamed for contributing to the death of the man. Some people said that they thought that the man was faking his illness. Some people did not even see the man lying on the ground.
I felt sad as I read this article about the death of this young man and wondered aloud if I would have done something had I seen his suicide unfold on the internet. I would like to think that I would have called in and alerted someone or would I too have thought that he had staged his suicide and merrily gone along my way.
Have a Happy Holiday season and if we see someone in distress over the holiday season, perhaps we could stop and see if they need our help.