INTRODUCTION:

During various evolutionary changes only humans have acquired the ability to kill themselves¹. Although suicides have been categorized in four types: egoistic, altruistic, anomic and fatalistic by Durkheim², new prototypes of suicidal deaths are observed in the last few decades. A hike of 43% has been reported as suicidal deaths in the last three decades, occurred due to various social, economic and emotional causes. Amongall 71% suicides were committed by people below 44 years of age. Majority were found to be below 30³.

A close link was also established between suicidal related behaviour resulting from overindulgence and misuse of social media⁴ a typical example of which in recent time is the deadly game “The Blue Whale Challenge”. The Blue Whale Challenge/Game is regarded as a suicidal game in which a group of administrators/curators preys upon young impressionable minds by providing a task (watching horror movies, causing harm to one's self, waking up early in the morning to listen to certain music and many more) which has to be completed daily for a period of 50 days. Participants are supposed to share photographs of the challenges/tasks provided and eventually commits suicide after completion⁵. The game was primarily played via Russian social networking site “V Kontakte” and have been the cause of over 160 suicides in Russia alone between the months of May 2015 to November 2016 and conquering the world drastically. The lists of tasks mentally deprives the player of any hope or self-esteem. The victims are taught that they are ‘losers’ and are better off dead. Emotionally weak and already depressed are usually the victims. They are usually selected from online suicidal groups such as ‘f57’ or ‘A silent house’ or ‘A sea of whales”. The game gets its name from the common belief that blue whales beach themselves in order to end their lives. It has been found its way into India with over 2000 kids downloaded the game⁵.

Tasks are given by the curators and at the end of completion of each tasks whale (players) have to send a photo as a proof. The tasks given are:

· Carve with a razor “f57” on your hand.

· Wake up at 4:20 am and watch psychedelic and scary videos that the curator sends you.

· Cut your arm with a razor along your veins, but not too deep, only 3 cut.

· Draw a whale on a sheet of paper.

· If you are ready to “become a whale, carve “YES “on your leg. If not, cut yourself many times.

· Task with a cipher.

· Carve “f40”on your hand.

· Type “#i_am_whale”in your VK status.

· You have to overcome your fears.

· Wake up at 4:20 am and go to a roof (the higher the better).

· Carve a whale on your hand with a razor.

· Watch psychedelic and horror videos all day.

· Listen to music that they send you.

· Cut your lip.

· Poke your hand with a needle many times

· Do something painful to yourself, make yourself sick.

· Go to the highest roof and stand on the edge.

· Go to a bridge, stand on the edge.

· Climb up a crane or at least try.

· The curator checks if you are trustworthy.

· Have a talk with a whale in skype.

· Go to a roof and sit on the edge with your legs dangling.

· Another task with a cipher.

· Secret task.

· Have a meeting with a whale.

· The curator tells you the date of your death and you have to accept it.

· Wake up at 4:20 am and go to rails.

· Don’t talk to anyone all day.

· Make a vow that you are a whale.

30–49: Every day you wake up at 4:20 am, watch horror videos, and listen to music that they send you, make 1 cut on your body per day, and talk to a whale.

50: Jump off a high building. Take your life⁶.

Modernisation of technology by introduction of artificial intelligence has replaced the need of psychological and emotional support among teenagers by their parents. It’s a need for every parent to monitor their kid’s online and social media activity to ensure that they are not engaging with the game leading to a spate of suicides all over the world. Epidemiology of the suicidal behaviour has always been an important concern among researchers⁷. In spite of the fact that technology is creating milestones in every field, there is increasing evidence that the Internet and social media can influence suicide-related behaviourby one way or the other⁴. Our mind controls everything including our existence and is also responsible for suicidal behaviour. Suicide is a game played by our, mind. It is the act of taking one’s own lives after failure of adaptation due to various external influences⁴. Suicidal tendency could be fostered by physical or mental frustration, technological influence, social torment, doubts and fears of acceptance, peer pressure and manipulation of thoughts during developmental stages etc⁸. Mind is the controller and generator of our thoughts and actions giving rise to depression or cheerfulness. Oppressing thoughts cause us to harm ourselves which in astringent conditions can even take away the life of a person^{9, 10}.

There are times when others are able to play with our minds. They knowingly or unknowingly manipulate us into thinking that its better and safe for us end our lives. Our mind also has the uncanny ability to hold on, have hope. Even when all was lost at the darkest of times, humanity stayed put due to this ability. But this hope which is within us can easily be plucked out by others. Manipulative suicides are a serious issue in today’s world, they are those attempted suicides in which a person tries to kill himself/herself due to manipulation of thoughts caused by the influence of external means¹¹. Thousands of people die each year because of others manipulation, majority of them being teenagers.

There are other indirect ways of manipulated suicides. One of them being called as the “Werther effect” in which when a book titled “The Sorrows of Young Werther” (By Goethe, 1774), its publication was followed by a number of suicides of young people. This was because of the fact that the protagonist of the book romantically kills himself after being rejected by the woman he loved. The book was later banned in most of Europe¹².

It is said that today’s youth are tomorrows citizen, if that is correct then we are killing our tomorrow’s citizens when we neglect the seriousness of manipulated suicides among teenagers today. Suicide is the third leading cause of death for teenagers and it is responsible for 20 deaths annually¹³.

METHODOLOGY:

It is difficult to generalize with no steady set of statistics. However, with the help of various methods such as survey method and case study method a generalised idea of leading trends in suicide can be established. The Blue whale challenge in the recent time has been the leading cause of manipulative suicides among teenagers. The basic five questions i.e. why such wicked websites are created, what could be the motive behind them, form where such ideas are originated, effect of such social media derived acts and how they can be prevented is the critical area of concern in recent times.

Various methods were adopted to conduct and understand the gravity of the issue. A survey was conducted by the means of two sets of questionnaire consisting the basic questions (Figure 1) and continuing with the serious questions stating the various causes for committing suicides (Figure 2). The answers to the questions paves a way for the further study indicating their state of mind and psychological behaviour and to gather prerequisite knowledge from a small group which consisted of college students between the age group of 12-22 years.

Figure 1

Figure 2

The questionnaire was designed to understand the psychology of students and degree of suicidal behaviour they possess. The students were asked questions such as how much attention they think they receive from their parents, the level of depression they think they possess, whether they have attempted a suicide, if yes then how many times, whether they have tried to self-harm themselves, if yes then how many times, their relationship status, whether they have encountered a death of any loved ones in recent time, their aims and objectives towards life, any health issues or distress such as insomnia, their academic performance, number of best friends they have and their perspective towards those who attempt a suicide. Interview method was also adopted to know the mind-set and awareness of the affair in teenagers.

Survey:

The detailed study about manipulative suicides or the Blue Whale challenge were acquired by various case studies. Data has revealed that over 200 kids have been victimized to this masochistic game till date. In India after its arrival 5 cases of Blue Whale challenge have been reported in Mumbai, Kolkata, Kerala, Indore and Dehradun. Initiatives have also been taken by the Govt. of India in which social media giants such as Google, Facebook, twitter and Instagram have been asked to remove all the links of the blue whale challenge to prevent further suicidal attempts¹⁴.

The answers to the questions of questionnaire helps to understand the perspective of 20adolescents and young adults self-harmers who were counselled by a psychologist. Each had their own story to tell because of which they became a self-harmer. Interacting sessions comprehended that all theself-harmers were not suicidal because they tried to resist themselves to take away their lives at a point because of their willingness to survive.

Pre-test:

Survey was made online which consisted of some basic questions. Participants were from between the age groups 12 and 22 years irrespective of sex. The total numbers of participants were 91.

Graph1: Demonstrates the level of attention each participant thinks he/she receive from their parents, on a scale of 1-10

93.41% of the participants were happy with the attention they received but there is a small 6.59% who thinks they do not receive enough attention (Graph 1). 84.61% of them were happy but 15.38% of them thought they have depression (Graph 2).

Graph 2: Demonstrates the rate of depression each participant thought they had.

It was found from the survey that from the percentage of participants who had tried to attempt suicide, 19 participants had attempted for suicide while 72 of them hadn’t (Graph 3), 43 of them have only attempted suicide once or twice while 18 of them more than twice (Graph 4), 32 of 91 were self-harmers (Graph 5) and 67 of them had no trouble falling asleep (Graph 6).

Graph 3: Pie chart showing the percentage of participants who had tried to attempt suicide.

Graph 4: Pie chart showing the frequency of committingsuicides

Graph 5: Pie chart representing the percent of self-harmers

Graph 6: Pie chart representing the percent of people who have difficulty in sleeping

RESULTS:

Every participant was asked general psychic questions and response of each were noted where 0 denotes NIL and 1 denotes good or yes (Table 1 and Table 2).

Table 1: Showing response of participants for each criteria

Sample	Parental attention	Insomnia	Self-harm	Suicidal	Depression	Relationship status
1	0	1	0	1	1	Single
2	0	1	0	1	1	Single
3	1	1	1	0	1	committed
4	0	0	1	0	1	Single
5	0	0	1	1	1	committed
6	1	0	0	0	0	Single
7	0	0	1	0	0	Committed
8	1	0	1	0	1	Committed
9	0	1	0	1	0	Committed
10	1	1	0	1	0	Committed

Table 2: Final number of participants with each criteria endangered to commit suicide

Manifestations	No of participants
Lack of parental attention	6
Depression	14
Suicide attempts	19
Self-harmers	32
Insomnia	24

Statistical analysis was also done for confirmation and authentication of results. Correlation values (Spearman’s coefficient) were calculated for each category at 5% level of significance and found that 82% of the variance (r=+0.9064; Variance=0.82156) of the depression scores could be explained by the variance of suicidal tendencies (Table 3). 97% of the variance (r=+0.9867; Variance= 0.97358) of the self-harm scores can be explained by the variance of suicidal tendencies (Table 4). 87% of the variance (r=-0.93966; Variance=0.8772) of the parental attention scores can be explained by the variance of suicidal tendencies (Table 5).

Table 3: Spearman’s coefficient and variance for depression leading to suicidal tendencies

DEPRESSION (x)	SUICIDAL TENDENCIES (y)
1	0
2	1
3	1
4	1
5	1
6	2
7	3
8	5
9	8
10	9

Table 4: Spearman’s coefficient and variance for Self-harmers leading to suicidal tendencies

SELF-HARM (X)	SUICIDAL TENDENCIES (Y)
1	1
2	1
3	2
4	3
5	3
6	4
7	4
8	5
9	6
10	6

Table 5: Spearman’s coefficient and variance for Parental attention leading to suicidal tendencies

PARENTAL ATTENTION (X)	SUICIDAL TENDENCIES (Y)
1	7
2	7
3	5
4	3
5	3
6	1
7	2
8	1
9	1
10	0

For significance of the result, the critical R value is calculated. The degree of freedom for these correlation sets is (n-2)=8. As the hypothesis is predicting a–or+direction, this is a one tailed hypothesis. P value for this hypothesis was found to be p=0.05. R values were checked from the critical value table. R for a one tailed hypothesis at p=0.05 with 8 degrees of freedom the critical value must exceed 0.549. Since all our calculated ‘r’ exceed the critical value, our correlation is significant.

DISCUSSION:

The research has yielded several key findings on manipulative suicides. First, the individuals with depression, insomnia, lack of parental attention, excess use of technology, peer pressure are more prone to be influenced by various manipulative actions resulting in attempt to suicide. Second, Blue Whale Game challenge is considered as the pillar stone for suicidal activity thus supporting the present study. The involvement of some beliefs regarding the game influence the suicidal behaviour:

1. Indulging kids who have no love for their family or self.

2. The over use of electronic devices are the reasons why teenagers fell into this traps.

3. Self-harming causes one to lose their will to live.

4. Teenagers being too involved with their outside the house relationships fall for this.

5. All the teenagers who played this game were overly pampered.

The recent study demonstrates and supports the present study in a way of asking teenagers to wake up at odd hours and consequently affecting the mental health of an individual¹⁵. Sleep complaints are more common in suicidal patients. Indeed insufficient sleep and sleep disturbances are common in depressive disorders and other psychopathologic conditions potentially associated with suicidal risk.In protudence, another study describing ‘self-harm” as not necessarily an attempt or even indicator of intent to commit suicide, indeed could sometimes be a form of self-preservation. The study showed that everyone who self-harms are not suicidal, in fact regularly self-harming people have lesser suicidal tendencies as their self-harming nature is their way of trying to survive thus supporting the present study where the findings demonstrates Self-Harm as the least (20%) factor for suicidal tendencies¹⁶.

Another researcher concluded“music preference” as an imperative indicator of vulnerability for suicide. The study showed significant associations between a preference for rock/metal and suicidal thoughts, acts of deliberate self-harm, depression, delinquency, drug taking and family dysfunction. It was claimed that an individual who feel sadder after listening rock/metal tended to have significantly higher “depressed” subscale scoresthussupporting the present study as in“Blue whale Challenge”, one of the tasks contains listening to the genres of music sent by the curators affects the mind-set negatively causing sickening effect¹⁷.

Besides supporting studies, some studies and surveys contradicts the present study. One of them being the myth that outside relationship status caused the suicidal tendency. But according to the survey, almost more than half the known victims of this challenge had their relationship status as single or searching on V Kontakte.

Psychologists suggest that the Internet and social media can influence suicide-related behaviour. To address this, a study supporting the present research provide an overview of ways that social media can influence suicidal behaviour, both negatively and positively⁴.

Gangte (2012) in his statistical analysis presented suicide rate in India in respect to the age and sex groups in 2011 contributing to more than 10% of suicides in the world. Majority of them occur among men and in younger age groups but the study fails to describe the causes and the risk factors¹⁶.

Supporting above research, Rosario (2011) in his study discussed suicidal tendency among Asian Americans and European Americans and concluded that among youths between fifteen to twenty-four years of age, suicide appears to be a continuing public health issue. Asian Americans are more likely to attempt suicide within this age category¹⁸. Causes of this disparity involves pressure faced by the “model minority” myth, challenges that lead to the underutilization of mental health services, and the effects of acculturation into American society¹⁸. The gap lies in the study that it took only limited population under consideration.

CONCLUSION:

The findings demonstrates that the individuals with depression, insomnia, lack of parental attention, excess use of technology, peer pressure are more prone to be influenced by various manipulative actions resulting in attempt to suicide. It was deduced from the study that 66% of kids without parental attention were suicidal, 80% of insomniacs were suicidal, 50% of single people were suicidal, 50% of depressed people were suicidal and rate of self- harmers were only 20%.

The need for preventing such attempts could be done by removing the stigma of self-harmers being suicidal and trying to make parents understand about the importance of their time in kid’s life. Moreover, over indulgence and dependency on technology should be reduced to the least point so that an individual could discuss their problems with those who can appropriately give the correct guidance and help them to cope with the extreme circumstances.

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Received on 08.06.2018 Modified on 25.06.2018

Res. J. Humanities and Social Sciences. 2018; 9(3): 529-534.

DOI: 10.5958/2321-5828.2018.00089.X

Manipulative Suicides: A New Paradigm of Suggestive Deaths among Adolescents and Young Adults

1. Suicide in Youth: Shifting Paradigm. (n.d.). Retrieved August 19, 2017 https://www.suicideinfo.ca/resource/siecno-20110005/