News for the Week of March 18, 2007

Last week, a reality check on the social Web's downside. This week, a look at an important positive development in social networking that parents will want to know about. It represents help for the high-risk kids vulnerable to sexual predation, as well as those struggling with substance abuse, eating disorders, relationships, cutting, and other challenges...

The social Web's 'lifeline'

The National Suicide Prevention Lifeline has 1,417 MySpace friends. That means 1,417 MySpace users have a link on their profiles to the Lifeline's Web site. This past year, just one of those profiles referred nearly 14,000 people to the national hotline - the page of "Xandria," who has 2,637 MySpace friends and links to nearly two dozen causes from her page. "Our site received more than 128,000 unique visitors from MySpace in the past 12 months," the Lifeline's Christopher Gandin Le told me. Even though MySpace donated $3 million in Lifeline ad placements a month this past year, only 13,000 of those 128,000 referrals actually came from the Lifeline's own MySpace profile.

"It's individuals who are exercising the power they have to help their friends and visitors," said Le, who is resource and information manager for the federally funded network with 120 call centers around the country. The support they give callers is free, confidential, and available 24/7, and they receive 1,300 calls a day nationwide (if someone doesn't answer after six rings, the call bounces to the nearest crisis center). But they don't only help people in suicidal crisis. The crisis centers get questions about depression, relationships, loneliness, substance abuse, and how to help friends and loved ones, I learned from Ginny Gohr, director of the Girls and Boys National Hotline, which is both local to Nebraska and the backup national hotline in the Lifeline network (its tagline: "Any problem. Any Time.").

Suicide: Teens' No. 2 killer

Even if the Lifeline were just about suicide, it's definitely a needed presence on the social Web. "More Americans die by suicide each year than by HIV/AIDS and homicide combined. It's the second highest killer of people aged 15-35 [after accidental death]," Chris Le told me. "I wish that more funders and advocates knew how big of an issue this was. I'd love to see mental health and suicide prevention where HIV/AIDS awareness is today [see joinRED.com]. I want to see suicide prevention and mental health awareness sold by the Gap, placed on iPods, supported by Amex."

Beyond MySpace

Parents should also know that MySpace isn't the only social site working with the Lifeline, it's just the biggest (with 160 million+ profiles now) and the first. "The reason why we have a MySpace profile was that, a year ago, we realized it was our top referrer," Le told me. At that time "it was just 10 kids linking to us, putting a banner up on their profiles. We noticed that the number of referrals they sent was higher than those sent by CDC [Centers for Disease Control], SAMSHA [the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Administration] or any other suicide-prevention service." The Lifeline is in talks with Facebook, Bebo, CarePlace.com, and Help.com, and hopeful, Le said, that a major project can evolve from these efforts. It's broadening its base of what the prevention community calls "gatekeepers," he explained. On the social Web, those gatekeepers are both individuals and whole Web sites, or communities, that enable both the reaching out and the support, from the informal kind that comes from friends and interest communities to mental health-care professionals. For more on this, see NetFamilyNews.