A popular high school student committed suicide after her cries for help to her hundreds of online friends were ignored. Ashley Duncan, 17, wrote ‘I finally got a gun’ and then posted a picture of a revolver which, soon after, it is believed she used to shoot herself dead. It followed a series of increasingly dark posts on Tumblr and Twitter where she talked of suicide, questioned the meaning of her life and said she was ‘miserable’. She wrote: ‘Life ain’t worth the pain. if you know or have known what it feels like to want to die every minute second hour day week month year then you feel me. ‘I might not struggle financially but I struggle emotionally and mentally and I think that’s the worst struggle. ‘So in asking why can’t it be my choice to die now?… I’m miserable. ‘One day I won’t be here anymore and that’ll be the happiest day of my life… I’m tired and I’m done with this life.’ ‘It’s like God is torturing me by keeping me here.’ She also wrote: ‘The only thing that made me happy is gone…I’m miserable.’ The ‘thing’ she refers to is not clear, but a previous post suggests she had just split up with a partner. She had written: ‘My heart is broken. I’m not picking up the pieces and I’m not gonna rely on anybody to put my heart back together. It’s just that destroyed.’

Just last year, that same community was rocked by news that 18 year old Ashley Billasano had committed suicide after Tweeting 144 times.

In those 144 tweets posted over the course of 6 hours, Billasano claimed she was molested and forced into prostitution.

She talked about how she dealt with the pain the first time.

“I went to the bathroom and locked the door”

“I took apart a razor. I did what I had to do to forget. I swear after that night I was never the same”

She talked about confiding with a boyfriend and telling her secret.

“I remember telling my closest teacher and CPS and the police detectives,” she said. “I remember having to tell them everything.”

While those are just two cases, we all know that online suicide notes are a much bigger problem that affects people of all walks of life.

Having the power to send out your thoughts to hundreds or thousands of people at a time can be helpful if the right person is able to hit you back and say the right thing to talk some sense into you,, but when they don’t ,or actually encourage you to go thru with it, it just seems to add fuel to the fire.

Suicide used to mean someone did something in private and if loved ones were fortunate enough a letter explaining why that person choose to take that route will exist.

Now I’m not saying social networks are bad and they promote suicides,, but what they can and increasingly seem to be used for is that ‘Last Hurrah’ by someone considering ending it all.

A depressed person may want to make a bigger ‘splash’ than just upsetting their loved ones who will find their lifeless body, so with social media they can control what in their minds could be considered a movie depicting the end of their life….it could be the first thing they truly felt they’ve been in control of in their lives.