How can I help people reflect on their online activity around suicide and self-harm?

Everyone’s online experiences are different. When you work with people around their online activity you can’t simply advise everyone to make one set of “safer” choices. You should work with each person on the right choices for them.

Together, you should explore how their internet use is affecting their mood and their experiences of suicide and self-harm.

This will help you to understand:

• what support they want and if they have access to it
• whether they have any further needs that aren’t being met
• if there’s anything about their online activity that might make recovery more difficult
• if there’s anything they want to change about their online activity.

What motivates their online activity around suicide and self-harm?

Some common motivations for exploring suicide and self-harm online are:

• Searching for people with similar experiences.
• Learning about and getting reassurance for how they feel.
• Expressing how they feel, such as through journaling or creative activities.
• Accessing support.
• Redirecting urges to harm themselves.
• Researching methods and means of harm.

You may find that people aren’t aware of all the reasons they explore content relating to suicide and self-harm. They may describe themselves as “randomly clicking on anything to do with suicide” or “browsing anything about self-harm”. You can work with them to understand the underlying reasons.

If you want more information on why people use the internet to explore suicide and self-harm, read our short guide.

How does their online activity make them feel?

Explore with people how their online activity around suicide and self-harm makes them feel.

Through your conversations, listen to whether:

• they feel comforted, reassured or empowered;
• anything they see makes them feel anxious or upset;
• they feel better or worse after visiting different sites or different types of online activity.

If they are posting about their experiences you can ask:

• how posting makes them feel
• whether it’s a helpful release
• whether they ever regret it
• whether or not they get comments (and how comments affect them)
• if they’ve ever had a post reported (and how that made them feel).

You can also ask how their interactions with others make them feel. Consider whether:

• their interactions help them feel less alone;
• they feel a pressure of responsibility to look after other people online;
• they worry about how things they post or share may affect other people.

Sometimes the people you support will find it hard to tell how they’re feeling. Techniques like keeping a diary can help.

What do they do online?

Ask open questions about what people do online. People may be slow to talk about this or may not want to go into much detail. They may feel private about what they post and share.

This is still a helpful topic because it can help you get a sense of what being online is like for them.

• What kinds of things do they post (producing their own content), view or share (reposting other people’s content)?
• What kind of sites, platforms or social media do they visit? What hashtags do they follow?
• Have they used the internet to investigate methods of harm?
• Do they use the same accounts for everything, or do they have separate accounts for their activity around suicide and self-harm?

Different people will find different things helpful or harmful. So it’s more important to understand their feelings and motivations around their online activity than focusing on specific sites or types of content they view.

If you’d like to know more about the potential risks of online activity, read our short guide.

Try to be open to the fact that some people spend a lot of time online. There can be several reasons for this.

• They may find making connections offline hard and feel unable to talk to people.
• Experiences around suicide and self-harm can be stigmatised offline. This can mean they find it easier to open up about their experiences online.
• Anxiety, agoraphobia and some types of neurodivergence can make it harder for some people to access support and make connections offline. For them, the online world can be particularly important.

Knowing that someone prefers the online world to most other interactions can help you understand what support would be best for them.

If you have ongoing contact with someone, come back to talking about their internet use around suicide and self-harm.

When something changes, that can be a useful time to provide further support.

This includes changes to:

• how they are feeling
• their thoughts, experiences or behaviours around suicide or self-harm
• the amount of time that they’re spending online or what they are doing
• their access to support and services.

To help someone who wants to make changes to their online activity around suicide and self-harm, use our guide to support you can offer.

To find out more about helpful or potentially harmful activity, read our overview of what we know.

Read our guide to giving online safety advice and helping people think through if they want to change anything about what they do online.

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