Facebook friend helps avert suicide from 3,000 miles away

All the lonely people.

The echo that is so often heard late at night across social networks.

In the latest case, a 16-year-old girl in Maryland learned that one of her Facebook friends, a boy in Oxford, England, was in distress. Late on Wednesday night, he wrote: "I'm going away to do something I've been thinking about for a while then everyone will find out."

The girl didn't know the boy's address. But she immediately felt this was a serious situation and told her parents.

They contacted the British Embassy, who in turn got in touch with Scotland Yard and the local police in Oxford.

All they had was a name. But they worked quickly to narrow the possibilities down to eight addresses.

(Credit: CC Jay Cameron/Flickr)

They sent police to each of these addresses, and within three hours of the Facebook message being written, the boy was found.

He had taken a drug overdose, but was alive.

This story follows the one earlier this year when a MySpace member in New Jersey helped a distressed teenager in Sacramento, Calif. And it comes in the same week that actress Demi Moore and her followers helped a woman in the San Jose, Calif., area after she had used Twitter to announce her suicidal intentions.

Sometimes you don't know who your real friends are.

[RadiantStar09]

This happened to me. I was talking with this woman on facebook that lives in Canada and she told me she was going to overdose in her room then. I got her information while talking with her and i told another friend and while i was talking her out of it, my friend called her information and found it was a grouphome and they went in and stopped her while i was talking to her. I believe that it was God's leading that i talk with someone i really didnt know too well at that time of day. To think that I almost didnt talk to her! WOW

[BlitzBoy1120]

Lucky to have friends like that. I'm glad I have friends like her too.

[Lerianis3]

Not going to help at all. Sure, you have prevented his suicide THIS time, but statistics show that people who are contemplating suicide do it within 5 years of that first thinking about it, period.
Even with treatment and mental health help, because they cannot be oblivious idiots like most of the people in this world and have realized how our world is going down the toilet.

[BGXterra]

lol and here i thought that i was the only one that thought the same

[sanenazok]

When has the world *not* been going down the toilet? Certainly it would do so a lot faster if everyone thought this way. There's always plenty of reason to be unhappy and want to check out due to terminal decline of society. Constant decay is a way of life. Welcome to the world! You have to find fulfillment in something even if it's writing morose messages on anonymous web boards.

[AngryCanadian]

Just curious, what statistics did you use to come up with this? I know that some people do in fact commit suicide within five years of their first attempt, but not everybody does. I should certainly hope not anyway otherwise this post was written by a corpse. What are the percentages?

Also, in many cases, people who are suicidal don't specifically want to die. They just want to end their pain and suffering, and death is certainly one way to do that. Having the right people around though, as this boy seems to, can go a long way though.

[rayzoredge]

Today, Facebook helps someone avert suicide.

Before, Twitter helped someone get out of jail from another country.

Long before, phones were invented and have been there, done that.

[CortalUX]

Eh, I've done the same thing on Facebook myself; admittedly, we were divided by 300 miles, not an ocean, but still. Sounds quite common.