Chicken Little is still screaming
There has to be a cultural element to the coverage of suicide in the UK that i don't understand. Literally thousands of people over there commit suicide and the general coverage,while it laments this fact, is decidedly factual. On the other hand, when it comes to suicides that have some sort of connection to the Internet, the reporting is almost always torrid over there. Thousands of people are killing themselves over there, and the experts all have something to say about it: people are said to be killing themselves because they don't see where they fit in with the rest of society etc., but if that person had any contact with an online suicide forum, suddenly it's as if none of those other factors have any significance at all and it's declared a "horrifying" fact that a grand total of less than 10 people have died after having been allegedly pushed to kill themselves by reading the information in the forum. If the subjects of the UK are so easily swayed by what they read on the Net that the offline elements of their lives that influence their decisions become insignificant by comparison, perhaps the happiest solution to this "horror" is to make access to the Internet illegal in the UK, period.