‘Suicide on Italian Instagram: Insights and implications for prevention and support’

Abstract

Instagram is the social network with the largest number of adolescent users in Italy; it is also the social network with the largest number of suicide-related posts. Suicide is the third leading cause of death in Italy in the 15–19 age group. This study aims to describe Italian posts on Instagram related to suicide and to investigate whether there are differences in the number of likes, comments, and hashtags in relation to the characteristics of the posts. We searched for Italian-language Instagram posts by typing ‘#suicidio’, an Italian translation of the English word ‘suicide’, and found 303 posts between January and May 2022. Most of the posts were written by ordinary people, while only a small percentage of posts were written by professionals; moreover, the content was predominantly biographical and pro-suicide, and most posts had no reference to adolescence. Posts with a neutral approach received the most likes, while posts with a negative or positive approach to suicide or that contained references to psychiatric disorders had the most hashtags. These results provide insight regarding guidelines that can be implemented for suicide online prevention and encourage psychologists to enhance online prevention and support using the online community inherent to the Instagram social network.