2 Kansas City Residents Die By Suicide After Visiting Website Encouraging Self-Murder
Two Kansas residents who took their own lives in separate incidents nearly half a year apart allegedly visited the same pro-suicide website prior to their deaths.
Miles Smith, 31, died in a Kansas City apartment in August 2021 after consuming a lethal dose of an unidentified chemical, The Kansas City Star reported.
An unnamed 23-year-old college student from Johnson County died the same way at a local motel five months later in January, according to the outlet.
Prior to their deaths, both Smith and the Johnson County man reportedly visited a website where people could discuss suicide. The two also bought the chemicals that would cause their deaths after they visited the site.
One of these pro-suicide websites was described by The New York Times as a place where "users share their suicide plans with one another, promote poisons and post 'goodbye posts' and real-time suicide attempts, which are the most-viewed posts on the site."
The founder of another such website described it as a "place for people to find help and a place to vent, as well as a place to find a suitable way of choosing to end their own lives, if that is their desire."
However, Lynn Hearst, Smith’s mother, claimed the website her firstborn visited attempted to convince its users that their thoughts were normal and that other people in their lives were not.
“And oh, by the way, your parents are part of the problem. The mental health profession is part of the problem. It plays into that narrative,” Hearst said.
“And that’s what happened with my son. I saw it with my son on messages ... with other members. He made it seem like his family really didn’t care. That wasn’t true. We were trying to reach out to him,” she explained.
An investigation conducted by The New York Times identified 45 members of the website Smith and the Johnson County man visited, including minors, in the United States and a handful of other countries who killed themselves after spending time on it.
The "trail of deaths is likely much longer," according to the investigation, as more than 500 members wrote "goodbye threads" that announced how and when they planned to end their lives and never posted again.
This kind of website operates legally in the U.S., but other countries have moved to ban pro-suicide websites, with Australia being one of the first to do so back in 2006.
"My description of what they do is that they’re serial killers. They’re picking on the weakest people of society. They’re feeding them a bunch of B.S. and they’re going to hotel rooms and drinking (chemicals)," the Johnson County man's father was quoted as saying.
"We don’t have anything else in society that does that, that allows that legally. And we have all these internet laws out there that are protecting these websites. It just is what it is," he added.
The Johnson County man's family has since consulted an attorney, who is searching for ways to hold the website accountable. However, they were warned that the chances of that happening were slim.
Health experts are still studying how the internet affects suicide risk and prevention efforts. A 2014 survey of 1,560 young people in the U.S. revealed a direct connection between the two.
People who visited pro-suicide sites were reportedly 11 times more likely to report thinking about hurting themselves and seven times more likely to report thoughts about killing themselves.
If you have thoughts of suicide, confidential help is available for free at the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline. Call 1-800-273-8255. The line is available 24 hours, every day.
