A new nationwide strategy to prevent suicides, especially among U.S. military veterans and younger Americans, will tap Facebook Inc as part of a community-driven push to report concerns before someone takes their own life.

The new Facebook service will allow users to report suicidal comments they see online from friends. The website will then send the potential victims an email urging them to call the hotline as well as chat confidentially online with a counselor.

"All too often, people in crisis do not know how - or who - to ask for help," Facebook Global Vice President for Public Policy Marne Levine said in a statement. "We have a unique opportunity to provide the right resources to our users in distress, when and where they need them most."

The effort, announced on Monday, is the first new plan in more than a decade to address what officials say is a growing public health issue and aims to curb deaths over the next 10 years.

"It takes the entire community to prevent suicides. It's not just one individual," says U.S. Surgeon General Dr. Regina Benjamin. "We call can play a role."

The plan, which also includes $55.6 million in grant funding for suicide prevention programs, will be released in Washington on Monday by Benjamin, U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius and Army Secretary John McHugh.

Suicide is a growing concern, taking the lives of twice as many people on average as homicide, officials said. They said on average, about 100 Americans take their own lives each day. More than 8 million U.S. adults seriously thought about suicide in the last year, according to the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration.

U.S. officials are also seeking to increase awareness in other media outlets with several new public service announcements to promote the national suicide prevention line, which is 1-800-273-TALK (8255).

Of particular concern are the nation's 23 million veterans.

President Barack Obama has made caring for those who have served in the military a top concern, including tackling mental illness, but it has been a struggle.

Despite his administration's efforts to expand prevention efforts for veterans, including beefing up a special hotline, the number of suicides appear to be growing. There were 17,754 suicide attempts among veterans last year - about 48 a day - up from 10,888 in 2009, data from the Department of Veterans Affairs showed.

"Suicide is one of the most challenging issues we face," McHugh said in a statement. "In the Army, suicide prevention requires soldiers to look out for fellow soldiers. We must foster an environment that encourages people in need to seek help and be supported."

The last major U.S. plan tackling suicide was in 2001. Since then, there has been more research and data about suicide and who is most at risk, as well as the best strategies to reach those people, Benjamin said.

"We now know what we didn't know 15 years ago - or we didn't understand - which is that suicide is preventable. So prevention is where we're focusing now," she said.

"We didn't really talk about suicide much," Benjamin added. "We didn't bring up the idea of suicide. We were afraid it might give someone a new idea. Now we know that it's important to ask 'Have you have suicidal thoughts?' or 'Are you thinking about suicide?' and say if you are, there are ways to get help."

Overall, any new effort that might encourage people to talk about how they are feeling would help, especially if trained experts can quickly reach those at risk, said Cheryl Sharp, who tried to commit suicide nine times between the ages of 13 and 24.

"If you're putting that out on Facebook, you're saying 'I am desperate, and I need help,' but you may not be able to make the phone call," said Sharp, now 55 and a special adviser on trauma-informed services at the National Council for Community Behavioral Healthcare, which represents state and local mental health organizations.

"You don't wait until someone says 'I want to die'. There are things that lead up to that," she said. "There is some way to make some kind of connection, and it's an online connection. I think it's good."

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Right now, nearly 114,000 people in the United States are waiting for organ transplants to save their lives. Tens of thousands more are in need of tissue, bone and cornea transplants to restore their mobility or sight. Facebook has decided to do something about the constant shortage of donors. 

The company has announced that members can now declare their desire to be an organ donor on their Facebook page. According to a press release signed by Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and COO Sheryl Sandberg, "…by simply telling people that you're an organ donor, the power of sharing and connection can play an important role." 

I agree. 

Donor cards and check-offs on driver’s licenses work, but not well. Sixty-two percent of Colorado's licensed drivers and ID card holders have signed "yes," for instance. But in the rest of the U.S., many more Americans have not. For example, fewer than 15 percent have checked the driver’s license donor box in New York State. Since most Americans say they do want to donate when they die -- a Gallup study found 95 percent support organ donation -- and since most families, when asked, do consent to donation by a loved one, why the poor donor card rates?

The answer, in part, is that the Department of Motor Vehicles is not the best agency to recruit organ donors. As I have argued in a recent article in the American Journal of Bioethics with philosophy professors Kyle Whyte and Evan Selinger, asking people to do something nice for others when they have been stewing in a long line, getting angrier and angrier while they wait is not conducive to altruism.

True story about my experience at the DMV: When I went to renew my license here in Pennsylvania, I told the official at the counter that I wanted to be an organ donor. She frowned and said maybe that was not a good idea, since she had heard that people who check the wish to donate box might not get aggressive care at the hospital. She had heard wrong, of course. But the point is, being asked to donate by someone who does not know the facts, or, does not really care about them, while waiting in a crummy environment, is not the best way to identify donors.

Facebook can help. That's mostly because the power of a donor card really is to let others know about your wishes when you die. However, if for some reason your card is not found when you die, or your family and friends do not know you signed it, then your desire to donate might be unknown -- or ignored. Facebook gives one more avenue for others to learn about your wishes -- and that is all to the good.

Some might argue that it could be coercive to have your friends publicly state they want to be organ donors, especially if you are not sure. I don’t think so. The choice is yours, but seeing that your family and friends have chosen to donate is a fact that might sway, not coerce, your decision.

So, good for Facebook for trying to help find more donors for those in need. Let’s hope, for the sake of all those waiting for the gift of life, it helps.

What do you think of publicly sharing your organ donor status on Facebook? Tell us... on Facebook

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By Stephanie Pappas
LiveScience

Facebook's initial public offering of stock is likely to make a lot of developers and designers of the site very wealthy. But for many users, frequent Facebooking may not be so beneficial.

According to three new studies, Facebook can be tough on mental health, offering an all-too-alluring medium for social comparison and ill-advised status updates. And while adding a friend on the social networking site can make people feel cheery and connected, having a lot of friends is associated with feeling worse about one's own life.

The thread running through these findings is not that Facebook itself is harmful, but that it provides a place for people to indulge in self-destructive behavior, such as trumpeting their own weaknesses or comparing their achievements with those of others.

Take status updates. Most people know that their Facebook friends tend to craft these online-wall memos on what they're up to in a way that puts their lives in the best light, said Mudra Mukesh, a doctoral candidate in marketing at the Instituto de Empresa in Madrid. But when it comes down to actually using the site, reading other people's status updates still makes Facebookers feel worse. [Facebook's Global Reach (Infographic)]

In research presented earlier this month at the annual meeting of the Society for Personality and Social Psychologists (SPSP) in San Diego, Mukesh and her co-author Dilney Goncalves found that when people think about the last time someone asked to friend them on Facebook, they get a boost in feelings of belonging and social connectedness ­— the kind of feeling that makes people "sing 'Kumbaya,'" Mukesh told LiveScience.

But once you've collected all those friends, viewing their status updates is a downer, Mukesh said. When asked how they felt about their place in life and their achievements, people with lots of Facebook friends gave themselves lower marks if they'd just viewed their friends' status updates, compared with people who hadn't recently surfed the site.

For people with just a few friends, viewing status updates wasn't a problem.

"A small number of friends means a low probability of viewing others showing off," Mukesh said. For people with lots of friends, though, the Facebook Newsfeed turns into a parade of good news about other people's live: promotions, engagements, weddings and new babies. Even if someone knows intellectually that people use Facebook to show off, Mukesh said, all of this information can make them feel worse about their own achievements or lack thereof. [10 Technologies That Will Transform Your Life]

(In Mukesh's study, 354 friends was the cut-off point for when participants started to feel bad about viewing status updates. But that's not a universal number, she cautioned, just the number that applied given the statistics of her sample.)

In another study presented at the SPSP conference, researchers at the University of Houston surveyed college students and found that time spent on Facebook is linked to depressive symptoms. That doesn't mean Facebook causes depression, but that depressed feelings and lots of Facebooking tend to go hand in hand, for whatever reason. For young men, the study found, the link seemed to be a tendency to compare oneself with others.

"It appears as if males, when they socially compare themselves on Facebook, they tend to experience depression systems," study researcher and University of Houston doctoral student Mai-Ly Nguyen told LiveScience.

In this case, Facebook seems to be a new medium for men to compete with one another, Nguyen said. Outside the digital realm, men often compare themselves with one another, she said. It may be that women more often use the site to connect with one another and men to compete with one another.

Some people, however, don't use their Facebook status updates to pump themselves up. Instead, they complain.

People with low self-esteem view Facebook as a safer place to express themselves than in face-to-face interactions, according to new research published in the March issue of the journal of Psychological Science. All this venting may actually alienate friends.

Researchers led by Amanda Forest of the University of Waterloo in Ontario collected recent status updates from 117 participants who also reported their average time spent on Facebook and answered questions to reveal their self-esteem levels. Some statuses were chipper, such as "[Poster] is lucky to have such terrific friends and is looking forward to a great day tomorrow!" Others wallowed in bad news: "[Poster] is upset b/c her phone got stolen :@."

Next, the researchers had another group of participants read the status updates and rate how much they liked the person who wrote each. Unsurprisingly, people responded more positively to posters whose updates were positive.

Of course, you'd expect friends to be a little more caring than strangers. So the researchers set up another experiment in which they collected recent status updates from 98 undergraduates and also asked the students to submit the number of likes and number of comments on each.

It turned out that for users with high self-esteem, a negative post garnered more responses than a positive one, presumably because those people's friends were concerned about the out-of-character update. For users with low self-esteem, though, negative posts seemed to exhaust friends: They got few responses.

"Indeed, [low-self-esteem users'] friends rewarded their posts with more validation and attention the more positive they were, perhaps trying to encourage this atypical behavior," Forest and her colleagues wrote.

The takeaway of all this work is not to dump your Facebook account — the site has its benefits, some psychological. But researchers suggest being mindful about your online social life, just as most people are about friends in the real world.

"You have to be careful," said University of Houston psychologist Linda Acitelli, who advised Nguyen on the social comparison study. "I think parents, especially if they have teenage kids, need to be monitoring how much time they spend on Facebook."

Because Facebook provides more opportunities to peer into others' lives, it helps to keep Facebook pitfalls in mind, according to the Instituto de Empresa's Mukesh. She found that reminding people in the moment of what they already know ­— that people brag on Facebook — can ease the self-recriminations that come with hearing about friends' accomplishments.

"At the end of the day, have more friends, there's no problem with that. Just be sure to remember that when you start feeling crappy about your life, think about the fact that you have a large number of friends and that increases your probability of viewing more ostentatious information," Mukesh said. "So, it's not you, it's them."

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