Ying-Yeh Chen: Taipei City Psychiatric Center, Taipei City Hospital, Taipei City, Taiwan; Institute of Public Health, School of Medicine, National Yang-Ming University, Taipei City, Taiwan.
Galen Chin-Lun Hung: Taipei City Psychiatric Center, Taipei City Hospital, Taipei City, Taiwan; Institute of Public Health, School of Medicine, National Yang-Ming University, Taipei City, Taiwan.
Qijin Cheng: Centre for Suicide Research and Prevention, The University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong.
Chi-Wei Tsai: Taipei City Psychiatric Center, Taipei City Hospital, Taipei City, Taiwan; Department of Public Health, National Cheng Kung University College of Medicine, Tainan, Taiwan.
Kevin Chien-Chang Wu: Department/ Graduate Institute of Medical Education and Bioethics, National Taiwan University College of Medicine, Taipei, Taiwan; Department of Psychiatry, National Taiwan University Hospital, Taipei, Taiwan. Electronic address: ccwu88@ntu.edu.tw.
Growing concerns about cyber-suicide have prompted many studies on suicide information available on the web. However, very few studies have considered non-English websites. We aimed to analyze online suicide-related information accessed through Chinese-language websites. We used Taiwan's two most popular search engines (Google and Yahoo) to explore the results returned from six suicide-related search terms in March 2016. The first three pages listing the results from each search were analyzed and rated based on the attitude towards suicide (pro-suicide, anti-suicide, neutral/mixed, not a suicide site, or error). Comparisons across different search terms were also performed. In all, 375 linked webpages were included; 16.3% of the webpages were pro-suicide and 41.3% were anti-suicide. The majority of the pro-suicide sites were user-generated webpages (96.7%). Searches using the keywords 'ways to kill yourself' (31.7%) and 'painless suicide' (28.3%) generated much larger numbers of harmful webpages than the term 'suicide' (4.3%). We conclude that collaborative efforts with internet service providers and search engines to improve the ranking of anti-suicide webpages and websites and implement online suicide reporting guidelines are highly encouraged.
