We aimed was to evaluate the use of social media in French people bereaved by suicide and to assess their expectations toward social media through an online survey which was part of a mixed-method collaborative and participatory user-centered study that aims to build resources from the perspectives of people bereaved by suicide. We were particularly interested in assessing how social media are used by people bereaved by suicide depending on their age, gender or relationship to their loved one who has died by suicide.
First, we found a high prevalence of the use of social media in our sample of 401 people bereaved by suicide. Indeed, nearly two-thirds of the participants used social media after suicide bereavement, and the vast majority of them used Facebook. This result is consistent with the common idea that social media has an important place in contemporary grief processes. Dilmaç [28], for example, emphasized that the digital age is modifying three primary characteristics of death. First, the chronological aspect of death implies that there is a before and an after death, although the deceased can live a second life on the internet. Second, death implies a physical separation between those who are alive and dead persons who are no longer part of the world, but no such separation exists in the virtual world. Third, death rites are needed so that the departed and their loved ones can gain slightly greater acceptance of the fatal truth. In this sense, funeral rites are characterized by their institutionality because they concern not only the individual but also the community and its culture [29]. Again, social media do provide “new forms of mourning”, described as a new funeral rituality [29, 30] that is specific to the Web and signifies “a complexification of our relationship to death” [31]. Our results highlight that social media can contribute to grief processes, such as sense- and meaning-making, by allowing people to access information on suicide or discuss their feelings or emotions with peers.
In our sample, parents bereaved by the suicide of their child were significantly more likely to use social media than others and tended to report specific patterns of use and expectations regarding social media for their grief process. This population is among the most heavily impacted groups after suicide loss [32] and displays high needs in the aftermath of the suicide loss. Notably, they might be more likely to expect to receive support messages on social media compared to other members of the family to cope with the feelings of shock, bewilderment and emptiness caused by the loss of their child. In a longitudinal qualitative study, Entili et al. [33] reported respondents’ changing needs and coping strategies over two years, with differentiation between strategies adopted by fathers and mothers. According to our results, social media could play an important role in supporting bereaved parents by helping them contact peers and obtain information on suicide and suicide bereavement.
Interestingly, we found that younger participants of our sample were more prone to use social media to memorialize than older participants. This result would be consistent with the hypothesis that social media is modifying the way new generations are mourning and commemorating the memory of their loved ones. Recently, King & Carter [34] performed a qualitative study of fourteen bereaved young millennials. The authors found that the participants gave great importance to social media for mourning. Notably, continuing bonds and expressing feelings and emotions were reported as the main motivations to use social media for grieving. Many participants in the study of King and Carter explained that they posted pictures, memories, videos and statements to continue their bonds with the deceased. Moreover, the participants explained that they posted directly to the deceased on birthdays and death anniversaries. Two participants bereaved by suicide in their study also noted that the reason they posted their grief online was to reduce the negative stigma attached to suicide.
According to our results, people in our sample who were recently bereaved were more likely to use social media than those who had been bereaved for more than three years. Further studies should examine how social media are used throughout the years during the grief process of people bereaved by suicide. Contemporary theories of grief describe it as a dynamic process in which the immediate aftermath is the most difficult stage, but periods of increased grief are found at points in the assimilation trajectory. It is possible that the suicide risk may be elevated at any of these points, e.g., in the immediate aftermath of the death and perhaps on anniversaries of the death. Anniversary reactions are conceptualized as psychological, somatic and behavioral reactions to temporal triggers of an anniversary of a substantial event [35]. There is some evidence to support this hypothesis, and several studies have reported an increased suicide risk and impaired mental health on bereavement anniversaries [36,37,38,39,40], while a recent study did not find any evidence of an elevated suicide risk around anniversaries in people bereaved by suicide [41]. Digital resources, such as memorial-based websites, may offer new ways to contact and support bereaved people [16, 17] and to implement innovative and adaptive prevention strategies to reduce the deleterious effects of bereavement anniversaries on mental health.
Unexpectedly, no differences were found between men and women according to their use and expectations of social media. In contrast, previous studies reported that men were at higher risk of not obtaining support after the suicide of a loved one and that men displayed specific patterns of grief [33, 42, 43]. This could mean that social media may constitute an interesting means to facilitate access to help and support for bereaved people who are usually lacking support. However, this result could also be explained by a lack of power due to the small number of male participants in our sample (11.5% of the sample).
Implications
According to our results, the role of social media in people bereaved by suicide is important, especially in the early period of bereavement. Based on our results and a recent expert consensus on postvention interventions [44], several recommendations can be provided for the use of social media to support people bereaved by suicide. First, social media must be considered a critical means to support people bereaved by suicide as an addition to, rather than a substitute for, other sources of support, such as face-to-face counseling or peer support groups. Second, social media should be seen as a way to disseminate information on suicide bereavement and to help people bereaved by suicide contact peers. Third, the special needs of some categories of people bereaved by suicide (especially parents bereaved by the suicide of a child or youth) must be met by social media. Fourth, evidence-based interventions using social media must be evaluated to better understand how they can help people bereaved by suicide in bereavement processes such as memorialization and sense- and meaning-making. Fifth, there is an urgent need for active engagement between mental health professionals and the social media industry to design appropriate and ethical social media platforms dedicated to supporting bereaved individuals. The community of those affected by mental health and suicide bereavement could indeed utilize social media to raise awareness and encourage individuals to seek or offer help in cases of mental distress.
Strengths and limitations
We performed the largest online survey on the use and expectations of people bereaved by suicide with regard to social media. With a total of 401 participants, we exceeded the goal of 385 participants for a convenience sample survey [27]. However, our study has several limitations. First, we performed a cross-sectional study, so no causal inference can be made based on our results. Second, the majority of participants were women, which may impede the generalizability of our results. However, the ratio was consistent with the ratios of previous studies on suicide bereavement [16, 45,46,47]. This may be explained by a higher propensity for bereaved women to participate in research compared to bereaved men [45, 47] and by the higher prevalence of suicide bereavement in women compared to men [48]. Third, we included only adults, so we could not collect data on the use of social media by bereaved children or adolescents. However, children and adolescents use social media with potential risks for mental health [49]. Further studies should assess how children and adolescents bereaved by suicide use social media. Fourth, our study was performed in France, so our results and conclusions must be generalized with caution. Finally, the use of an online survey may have induced selection bias because people who do not often use online resources may have been less prone to participate in our study. It is notable that the vast majority of the participants reported daily use of the internet and social media. However, the Internet has been identified as a compelling means to recruit people bereaved by suicide to participate in research [47].
This post was originally published on this site be sure to check out more of their content
