Expert speaks of 'sinister' chat rooms where strangers meet and plan their suicides together World conference on suicide.
Parents need to wake up to the fact that there are sinister sites on the internet which their children could be accessing, including ones which encourage suicide, the secretary of the Irish Association of Suicidology has said.
Dr John Connolly said that up to now the focus has been on the vulnerability of children to paedophiles on the internet but equally sinister were sites which detailed how young people could take their own lives.
He was speaking at the start of an international conference on suicide in Killarney, where one of the key topics yesterday was suicide and the internet.
He said it was a huge concern that youngsters could use the internet to find out more about ending their lives.
"That is a huge concern because there are some very sinister and dangerous sites on the internet that encourage suicide and they give explicit detail on how to end one's life in several different ways," he said.
"And the next sinister thing about the internet is the chat rooms where people meet, strangers meet who are determined to take their own lives, they meet and they plan their suicide together," he added.
He cited as an example the fact that it was reported earlier this year that two young men, who drowned in a lake in Co Tyrone, had arranged their deaths via an internet chatroom. One of the men was from Omagh, the other from Walkinstown in Dublin.
Dr Connolly said these kind of cases were a big problem in the UK, America, Japan and Hong Kong.
"We know of only one case in Ireland so far where the suicide was planned on the internet . . . so maybe there's a chance for us, with the knowledge other countries have, of doing something positive to deal with these sites before it is too late," he said.
Dr Connolly urged parents to police what their children were accessing on the internet.
"Parents need to wake up," he stressed.
Meanwhile, Anthony Langan, public affairs manager with the Samaritans, revealed that 1,100 people in the UK and Ireland had ended up accessing his organisation's website in 2006 after typing "I want to die" into an internet search engine.
This was "a lot" of people, each of them individuals in need of help, he said.
He stated that the Samaritans had worked with search engines such as Google and Yahoo to ensure that if somebody searched for a match for words such as suicide on them they would immediately be presented with the option of accessing the Samaritan's web page.
Meanwhile, Rachel O'Connell, chief safety officer with the online social networking website Bebo, told delegates she believed sites like Bebo had enormous potential to reach out to youngsters in trouble.
She encouraged service providers to take space on the site so that young people needing help could access them. "Young people feel this is their space . . . we have to think outside the box and look at ways in which we can provide services to young people within the context in which they operate," she said.
Bebo, she added, has 1.6 million users in the Republic and does not censor content put on the site by users, but if a user complains about worrying content put up by another person, it will take action.
But she said the company operated under a host of legal constraints and under privacy laws it could not give a family access to the personal page of a user, if that user went on to take his or her own life.
Angela Kerins, chief executive of Rehab, which hosted the seminar on suicide and the internet, said there has been much controversy in recent years about the negative and sinister role the internet played in rising suicide rates. But it had an "essential role" in suicide prevention.
There are up to 600 suicides in the Republic every year.