Can Facebook Help Prevent Suicide?

This transcript has been edited for clarity.

I'm Dr Drew Ramsey, an assistant clinical professor of psychiatry at Columbia University in New York City. Welcome back to the Brain Food blog.

I wanted to tell you about an experience I had a few weeks back at the Facebook headquarters here in New York City. Daniel J. Reidenberg, PsyD., executive director of Suicide Awareness Voices of Education, brought together a group of mental health and suicide prevention advocates, along with the global head of safety at Facebook, Antigone Davis, to discuss how the company has been handling what is a new issue for them.

After launching platforms like Facebook Live, they determined that they were increasingly being used by people to write suicide notes or to engage in self-harm while on live video. This is obviously the type of content that Facebook has to monitor very closely. I was impressed by all of the efforts they've put in place to counter this. It made me wonder, can Facebook prevent suicides?

Obviously, the company is a part of a larger debate and controversy right now, which I'll leave to other experts to discuss. But when it comes to mental health, it's really interesting to see the different tools that Facebook is developing.