Exploring Timelines of Confirmed Suicide Incidents Through Social Media

Suicide is one of leading causes of death worldwide, yet little data is available about the lives of suicide victims because most people do not seek treatment. Research has shown that people express suicidal ideation in social media, which can potentially be tapped to improve our understanding of the thoughts and behaviors of people prior to suicide. In this work, we introduce a novel dataset of Chinese social media accounts of 130 people who committed suicide between 2011 and 2016. We describe the demographic and geographic composition of the users, then conduct a longitudinal text analysis of their post histories, showing observable changes in content leading up to the time of death. With encouraging exploratory findings, we discuss directions for future research.