Analyzing Sanctioned Suicide: a case study on pro-choice suicide sites

According to the World Health Organization, close to 700’000 people take their own lives every year. Suicide has always been a socially important topic, so much so that free hotlines, help bots and automatic banners are displayed and easily accessible to people that search related keywords on the web. In the last year, it has come to light the existence of Sanctioned Suicide, a pro-choice forum discussing suicide, where users can both look for help with their recovery or research and asks questions about methods and how to acquire them. These types of sites have yet to be extensively researched in the literature. Their analysis could allow us to better understand what are the topics discussed and how these communities act, very useful knowledge for suicide prevention and help of suicidal individuals. In this thesis, we use Sanctioned Suicide as a case study and investigate how it is organized, what knowledge can be found and how users communicate in this environment. We have collected data for a total of 53K threads, 700K comments and 16K users. We use this dataset to analyze user trends, extract the topics of conversation in the forum and uncover hidden relations. Our analyses show that 30% of the topics found in Sanctioned Suicide discussions deal with suicide methods. We also discover that Covid has been a distress factor for users, especially during the first lockdown, highlighting a strong connection between talks of suicide and Covid.