Suicide prevention is an important aspect in public health and takes part in works related to mental health. Preventing people from committing suicidal actions can be arduous and requires multi-level public health interventions. Since 1997, suicide has been one of the top ten causes of death in the country, causing mortality rate to increase year by year and reaching its peak in 2006. Among 100,000 people, an average of 19.3 people died and a total of 4,406 people in Taiwan committed suicide in 2006. Therefore, there is an urgent need for national suicide prevention and control. This promoted the first phase of the "National Suicide Prevention Strategy Action Plan" starting from 2005 and the "Suicide Prevention Center" was established on December 9, 2005 to work together on suicide prevention.
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Entrusted by the Ministry of Education to promote and address mental health importances and the creation of suicide prevention booklets.
According to the Ministry of Education’s data from 2017 to 2019, the number of "self-injury" cases among elementary school children to college students in Taiwan has increased in recent years. The "Suicide Prevention System" data from the Ministry of Health and Welfare in 2019 also highlighted that the number of reported injuries from people aged 0-17 increased from 1,381 to 3,390, and the number of cases from people aged 18-24 increased from 3,932 to 5,938. In the same year, data from the “Campus Security Report Center” shows that the number of self-injury reports grew as grade levels increase: Elementary schools, junior high schools, vocational high schools and senior high schools, and universities gained 353, 1344, 1376, and 1402 self-harm cases respectively, and the overall number of suicidal deaths was 107. Noticeably, the number of reported self-injury cases and suicidal deaths have increased significantly from 2018 to 2019 in schools. Overall, the suicide death rate of the 15-24-year-old age group has reached the highest point in the past 20 years.
Taking information above into account, aside from exploring the suicide risk factors for children in every age, it is imperative to study how the first-line protection system can be provided from the school, family, children themselves, and other possible levels. For example: engaging with the deterring factors of suicide and creating a supportive environment (such as increasing campus gatekeepers, eliminating bullying, and removing stigma), or paying attention to the adolescents’ physical and mental health. At the same time, it is necessary to strengthen the willingness of students to seek help and medical treatment and trust mental health care systems. These measures would rely on systematic planning and put the characteristics of different school systems into considerations to develop a comprehensive intervention plan for students. In addition, examining adolescent stress management is also an important foundation for suicide prevention. Stress is the root of all mental illnesses, and learning how to better adjust to stress with the cooperation of schools, families, and students themselves can help adolescents maintain physical and mental stability, which will also contribute to the effectiveness of suicide prevention.
In order to achieve the goals listed above, first, the supportive conservation environment of a campus shall begin with the creation of a caring culture, as well as the education and training of teachers and staff of the school. Even though Taiwan currently acquires suicide prevention laws which ensure that all agencies, groups, organizations, and schools must have “Suicide Prevention Gatekeeper Training” (also known as “Cherishing Life Gatekeeper Training”), there are still very few professional teaching material that are standardized relating to campus suicide prevention. There are only a few programs that are applicable for all schools, relevant to students of different ages, and their families. Systematic planning to promote mental health in schools and suicide prevention are lacking as well. Therefore, the purpose of this initiative is to collect the needs and opinions of educators, administrators, students (including dropouts/expelled students, who are at higher risks of committing suicide), parents, and guardians. This data will then be used to develop mental health and suicide prevention teaching materials suitable for a wide range of academic systems in order to promote suicide prevention in campuses and highlight the importance of such topics in the Taiwanese education system.
The growing of internet use problems including internet overuse or inappropriate online message delivery has become a serious concern in the recent years by both the government and the public. These problems can be related with poor life adjustment, internet addiction, and internet bullying which have caused physical and mental health problems, and even elevated suicide risk. As the internet has played an important role in suicide prevention, this project aims to analyze how suicide message or information such as online news, self-media and social media is transferred online in order to early engage with suitable service for people under suicide crisis. This project will focus on connecting the information technology with suicide prevention and developing an A.I suicide prevention platform in Taiwan. Therefore, three targets were planned in order to achieve the project aim. The first target is to prevent copycat suicide from inappropriate suicide information online. The second target is to develop psychiatric and mental health online service or referral procedures, which might be able to minimize the effect of broadcasting online suicide message or suicide pact events. Thirdly, the project is targeting on early identification of the online suicide high-risk group (e.g., long-term internet users or people engaged in cyberbullying). The development of early identification is intending to build up an active monitoring--tracking-rescue model (MTR model) to avoid suicide. In this one-year project, a multidisciplinary workforce and framework will be developed at the begining, followed by review of local and international literature on the subject of internet suicide message and hotspot surveillance, monitoring and rescue strategies. A pilot test of artificial intelligence application in the field of suicide prevention will be performed, including the development and validation of an algorithm and detection model to identify suicide new report contents online message that involve inappropriate suicide message or suicide hotspot. Meanwhile, an online social media such as the Dcard will be tested using the abovementioned algorithm. The research team will utilize the AI technology invented for this study to perform online suicide message surveillance for three months, targeting at investigation of the current online transmission of suicide message and its impact to suicide behaviors. Next, feasible models will be proposed that contain the searching of suicide-related message or suicide hotspot information through crawling of targeted websites with their subsequent visualized surveillance imaging systems developed in this project. Following the invention of these models, we will develop the action plans for the consequent monitoring and rescue procedures after case or risk detection, which will be integrated into the AI platform of suicide prevention in Taiwan. The outcome of this project will be to produce internet suicide prevention guidance for inter- and cross-disciplinary strategic plans toward suicide message and hotspot information detection under collaboration of an IT team with the underlying research team. Following from this guidance, we will further develop the monitoring-tracking-rescue model (MTR model) to make suicide message or suicide hotspot searching and visualized monitoring more accessible in the suicide prevention services and standardized procedures. We will also propose the cost, manpower, outcome indicators, and its feasible data collection or analytical methods.