R.I. governor vetoes ‘domestic partners’ burial bill
Katherine Gregg, The Providence Journal, (November 10, 2009)

Note: This post first ran in November 2009. We’re reposting it now, after President Obama’s recently announced support for same-sex marriage. Most people do no realize the legal obstacles same-sex partners often face when attempting to claim their partner’s corpse given the lack of either a marriage license or any statutory recognition of the relationship. This 2009 story from Rhode Island demonstrates all the issues. See our section on same-sex partners for more information. Two final notes. Donald Carcieri is no longer Rhode Island’s Governor and in January 2010 the RI Legislature overrode the Governor’s veto.

When a person dies, his or her body needs to be claimed by the next of kin. If no kin can be found, then that dead body is handled by local authorities. The legal question of who (or whom) qualifies as next of kin is a real dilemma when it involves domestic partners who have been together for numerous years but lack any say over the final disposition of the body. Asserting a legal claim over the control of the corpse is a key issue for same-sex marriage proponents as well as domestic partnership advocates (which would cover heterosexual couples too).

Last week, in Rhode Island, the Governor vetoed a new Domestic Partners bill that would have granted same-sex and opposite-sex partners next of kin status for claiming dead bodies. This Providence Journal article discusses the veto and why Governor Carcieri did what he did.

I promise that in the future, people will look back and read these histories with disbelief.

You need only read this section of the Providence Journal article to understand why:

At a hearing this year on one of the stalled bills to allow same-sex marriage, Mark S. Goldberg told a Senate committee about his months-long battle last fall to persuade state authorities to release to him the body of his partner of 17 years, Ron Hanby, so he could grant Hanby’s wish for cremation — only to have that request rejected because “we were not legally married or blood relatives.”

Goldberg said he tried to show the police and the state medical examiner’s office “our wills, living wills, power of attorney and marriage certificate” from Connecticut, but “no one was willing to see these documents.”

He said he was told the medical examiner’s office was required to conduct a two-week search for next of kin, but the medical examiner’s office waited a full week before placing the required ad in a newspaper. And then when no one responded, he said, they “waited another week” to notify another state agency of an unclaimed body.

After four weeks, he said, a Department of Human Services employee “took pity on me and my plight … reviewed our documentation and was able to get all parties concerned to release Ron’s body to me,” but then the cremation society refused to cremate Ron’s body.

“On the same day, I contacted the Massachusetts Cremation Society and they were more than willing to work with me and cremate Ron’s body,” and so, “on November 6, 2008, I was able to finally pick up Ron’s remains and put this tragedy to rest.”

“I felt as if I was treated not as a second-class citizen, but as a noncitizen,” Goldberg told the Senate Judiciary Committee, an hour into the first hearing this year in the 13-year push by gay-rights advocates for the right to marry in Rhode Island, and the pushback from the Roman Catholic Church and other opponents.

Kathy Kushnir, executive directive of the advocacy group Marriage Equality of Rhode Island, called the governor’s veto “unconscionable” when “people are trying to piece their lives together, which is what Rhode Island is requiring them to do without legal recognition,” and then when “faced with a time that could not be more difficult or more painful, not even being able to take care of funeral arrangements for their loved ones.”

The Afterlife of Artificial Hips and Knees
Clark Boyd and Rob Hugh-Jones
PRI’s The World via BBC News (February 21, 2012)
The metal used in surgical implants can be melted down and recycled after people are cremated, and these days it often is.

Long time readers of the Death Reference Desk might remember this August 2009(!) post: Reduce – Reuse – Recycle – the Dead… I mention this particular post because the BBC News and PRI’s The World radio programme just did a piece on a Dutch company that recycles metal implants used in humans.

Here’s the rub: the metal implants are recycled after an individual is cremated.

In all honesty, there isn’t much new about this technology but since the process involves dead bodies it is always fascinating.

Indeed, if you would like a full rundown on everything Eco-Death then click away. We’ve been covering this topic since Death Ref took its first humble steps.

Here is the lead from the BBC News article:

As people live longer and medical technology improves, more and more of us will have a surgical implant before we die. We are also getting cremated in larger numbers – and so there is often some expensive metal left among the ashes. Where does it go?

“You tell people what you do, and they think… well, that’s a bit strange,” says Ruud Verberne above the din of giant sorting machines twirling and clanking.

Verberne is co-founder of OrthoMetals, which recycles metal implants from cremated human bodies. That’s everything from steel pins to titanium hips and cobalt-chrome knees.

These are the knees that we have to recover,” he says. “Some metals can be sorted by magnets. And the remaining have to be sorted by hand.”

Strange it may be, and a bit macabre perhaps, but this kind of recycling is a growth industry.

“I know the existence of five or six competitors that we have, most of them in the United States,” says Verberne, whose company is based in the Dutch city of Zwolle. “But we were first.”

There isn’t a ton of money to be made in postmortem-human-implant-metal-recycling but that is probably ok.

And who knows where the implant metal recycling market will lead. I am keeping my eye on a Detroit, MI company, Implant Recycling, in the hopes that one day Motor City will rise again by cornering the market.

That particular Renaissance would be only too fitting.

Under Recent Policy, Cook County Begins Donating Unclaimed Bodies after 2 Weeks
Cadavers that are left in morgue are given to medical research
Becky Schlikerman, William Lee and Ronnie Reese, Chicago Tribune (October 04, 2011)

Medical Examiner: Families Who Object to Body Donation Can Opt for Burial
Becky Schlikerman, Chicago Tribune (October 05, 2011)

There was a bit of a dead body tug-of-war this week in Chicago. According to an October 4 article in the Chicago Tribune, any dead body left unclaimed for two weeks in the Medical Examiner’s office will be handed over to the Illinois Anatomical Gift Association.

But wait, that’s not totally true.

According to an October 5 article in the Chicago Tribune, the Medical Examiner’s office will not donate any unclaimed body to the Anatomical Gift Association when the ME’s office knows that the next-of-kin cannot afford to have the dead body claimed and the next-of-kin want a burial.

Here is the bigger issue in this story: the overall costs for retrieving a body from a Medical Examiner’s office have become too expensive for many families.

We started covering this situation in 2009, when the Death Reference Desk launched. You can look over all those previous posts in the Death + the Economy section.

More and more county morgues across America are dealing with not only unclaimed dead bodies, but unclaimed dead bodies and families who know exactly where said dead body is located but can’t afford to do anything about it.

As a result, the Cook County story is hardly surprising.

Given the economic difficulties more and more American families face, this story represents not an anomaly but the future.

For more on Medical Examiners and their work, watch the fantastic Frontline documentary Post Mortem: Death Investigation in America

Death and Budgets
David Brooks, New York Times (July 15, 2011)
Much of the budget mess may stem from a deep cultural antipathy toward recognizing our own mortality.

The Quagmire: How American Medicine is Destroying Itself
Daniel Callahan and Sherwin B. Nuland, The New Republic (July 15, 2011)

Since the American political system (read: mostly the Republican party) seems hell bent on watching the federal government go into default I though that I would revisit a recent column by David Brooks in the New York Times. Earlier in July, Brooks wrote about spending on End-of-Life care and Medicare. For those who don’t understand the idiosyncrasies of the American health care system, Medicare is the medical insurance all US citizens receive at age 65. It’s a good program. Both my parents use it.

One of the financial issues that Medicare faces is that more and more people are living to be older than before. Well into their 80s. The extension of age, by itself, isn’t an issue. Where the problems begin are with medical costs soaring in the last few months of life.

The second article at the top, by Daniel Callahan and Sherwin B. Nuland (which Brooks references), explains the costs this way:

In a 2006 article, Harvard economist David Cutler and colleagues wrote, “Analyses focused on spending and on the increase in life expectancy beginning at 65 years of age showed that the incremental cost of an additional year of life rose from $46,800 in the 1970s to $145,000 in the 1990s. … If this trend continues in the elderly, the cost-effectiveness of medical care will continue to decrease at older ages.” Emory professor Kenneth Thorpe and colleagues, summing up some Medicare data, note that “more than half of beneficiaries are treated for five or more chronic conditions each year.” Among the elderly, the struggle against disease has begun to look like the trench warfare of World War I: little real progress in taking enemy territory but enormous economic and human cost in trying to do so.

One of the most important ways to address these cost issues is by talking about death and dying. The crux of David Brooks article is that:

…we think the budget mess is a squabble between partisans in Washington. But in large measure it’s about our inability to face death and our willingness as a nation to spend whatever it takes to push it just slightly over the horizon.

I agree. Callahan and Nuland also make a similar argument. Indeed, the Death Reference Desk ran a piece in August 2009 on exactly this issue: America and End-of-Life Care: Death, Dying, and Mortality.

In fact, most of the death with dignity posts on Death Ref deal with the question of death acceptance in one way or another.

So, what’s to be done. Until the US budget issues are sorted, not much. The first step, which isn’t easy by any means, is telling people that death is ok. Especially at the end of life, when compassionate care will go a long ways towards extending quality of life instead of fixating on the quantity of days.

Callahan and Nulland make a quick reference to the “…war against death” in their essay.

They are absolutely correct. A war is being fought against death, particularly in America.

And we modern humans will lose that war. Every single time.

Terry Pratchett: Choosing to Die
BBC iPlayer (only available until 9:59PM Monday, June 20, 2011)

Terry Pratchett’s BBC Documentary Reopens Debate on Assisted Dying
Fantasy writer’s film shows final moments of a man with motor neurone disease at Dignitas clinic in Switzerland
Esther Addley, The Guardian (June 07, 2011)

Terry Pratchett Defends Choosing to Die Documentary from Critics
Critics round on writer and BBC for promoting assisted dying in film that included footage of man’s death at Dignitas clinic
Haroon Siddique, The Guardian (June 14, 2011)

TV Review: Terry Pratchett: Choosing to Die
When life is finally squeezed of all its juice, Terry Pratchett finds there’s tea on tap
Sam Wollaston, The Guardian (June 13, 2011)

I cried and cried towards the end of Terry Pratchett’s documentary on Assisted Dying. My tears arrived not at the end of the documentary, where Pratchett watches UK citizen Peter Smedley die in Switzerland at the Dignitas Clinic. Rather, I began to cry when the various individuals involved in this documentary started traveling to Switzerland. I can only explain my emotional response as tears of respect for Peter Smedley and his wife as he chose death over a physical life increasingly controlled by motor neurone disease.

The documentary, Terry Pratchett: Choosing to Die, was shown on BBC 2 Monday night and it created a week’s worth of commentary. Most of it predictably either for or against everything in the documentary.

I do not know what to say any longer about the UK’s debate on Assisted Dying. Indeed, the Death Reference Desk has a number of pieces on Assisted Dying debates in both the UK and the United States. You can review all of those previous posts here. It’s worth noting, I think, that when Death Ref started in July 2009 some of the first posts were on the UK’s Assisted Dying debates.

Some pieces of that debate have changed but not significantly. The only anti-Assisted Dying argument that I will flag up as incorrect is the assertion that the deaths which people choose somehow diminish the value of hospice care. That is not true. Many many people choose hospice care at the End-of-Life and I wholeheartedly support that choice. But hospice care and End-of-Life care are different than choosing an Assisted Death. These things are related but they are not co-terminus. Advocates for both hospice care and assisted death often find themselves in televised debates but these same individuals are involved in entirely different kinds of conversations.

Most importantly, neither ‘side’ will ever agree. They just won’t. The best that anyone can work towards, I think, is a well regulated, extremely stringent law which both increases funding for hospice care and allows Assisted Dying. The model law is Oregon’s Death with Dignity Act.

Every year, the state of Oregon publishes an array of statistics which explain how the law was used the previous year. Here is the 2010 statistic that I think most people would benefit from knowing:

Most (96.9%) patients died at home; and most (92.6%) were enrolled in hospice care at time of death.

In fact, you can read all of the 2010 statistics here.

If you are in the UK, then you can still watch the documentary until Monday night for free on the BBC iPlayer.

If you are in the United States then I would suggest that you watch the Frontline documentary The Suicide Tourist. I discussed that documentary earlier this year and it is extremely good. It also follows a person to Dignitas who chooses to die.

Barring either of these options, I have embedded a short clip from Terry Pratchett’s documentary.

Rest assured, these conversations about Assisted Dying in the UK will continue.

Life After Kevorkian
He fought for the right to assisted suicide. Now what should we do with it?
William Saletan, Slate (June 3, 2011)

I am a member of the Kevorkian generation. Those of us in our mid-to-late thirties and onwards into our forties are usually called Generation X (for those who still remember the 1990s…) but I really think that we are Kevorkian’s kids.

Jack Kevorkian, who died last week, began assisting suicides in 1990. As soon as he started this work, debates began about the legality and ethics of assisted dying. I have distinct memories of these debates, which started during my high school years and carried on into college.

I and my peers came of age and entered adulthood surrounded by End-of-Life debates. Most people have mixed feelings about what Kevorkian did but at least he made people talk about death and dying. And those conversations have had an impact over the years.

So say what you will about Jack Kevorkian but he really contributed to a debate that informed an entire generation’s future. And as we all begin looking towards the End-of-Life for our own parents, I know that Jack Kevorkian’s influence will be felt.

The Slate article by William Saletan at the top is the best essay/article that I found after Kevorkian died.

Here is how Saletan concluded his piece and I wholeheartedly agreed with him point by point:

Kevorkian didn’t have the answers. But he raised the right questions. We can’t criticize his flaws, temper his ideas, and praise the hospice movement without acknowledging what he did. He forced an open conversation about the right to take your own life. Under what conditions, and within what limits, should that right be exercised? Even if it’s legal, is it moral? What do you do when a loved one wants to die? Kevorkian didn’t take those questions with him. He has left them to us.

The obituaries in both the Washington Post and the New York Times were also good.

What struck me most about Kevorkian’s death was how he died in the middle of a debate that he, alone, significantly pushed along.

This is also a debate that will most assuredly continue without him.

In mid-May, for example, large majorities of voters in Switzerland re-affirmed the right of individuals to choose an assisted death. The Swiss voters also (and more significantly) voted against proposals to ban citizens from other nations from using the Dignitas clinic, for example, to die.

Just this past week, the Personal Health columnist for the New York Times, Jane Brody, wrote a compelling column about New York Doctors who are not comfortable discussing End-of-Life decisions with their patients. Doctors in the state of New York are now required by law to discuss End-of-Life planning and some MD’s do not want to do it. The copy title for Brody’s column sums up the situation: Law on End-of-Life Care Rankles Doctors

And then last weekend, WNYC’s radio program On the Media ran a story on how the ‘Death Panels’ allegation used by opponents to President Obama’s health care law received press coverage which seemed to validate the absurdity of that claim.

I could go on and on with the examples. Indeed, a version of each of these stories has been previously covered by Meg, Kim, and myself since the Death Reference Desk began in 2009.

Here, then, is my point: Jack Kevorkian got an entire generation of young people, now in their mid-to-late thirties and soon to be in their late forties, thinking about dying, and in such a way that I can only hope it helps End-of-Life conversations with aging parents and elderly grandparents.

Jack Kevorkian didn’t inspire my generation, per se, but he played a much bigger role in our development than most people realize.

I will wrap everything up with a video obituary by the NewsHour on Public Television.

PBS NewsHour: Jack Kevorkian, Doctor who Brought Assisted Suicide to National Spotlight, Dies

Watch the full episode. See more PBS NewsHour.

Watery Grave, Murky Law
Leor Halevi, New York Times (May 08, 2011)
Osama bin Laden’s burial at sea and the history of Shariah.

Bin Laden Exits the Scene
On the Media, WNYC and National Public Radio (May 06, 2011)

It has been one week since President Obama announced that Osama Bin Laden was dead. I happened to be in New York City when the announcement was made so I immediately began taking stock of the entire situation. Within the annals of infamous dead bodies (Eva Peron, Hitler, Che Guevara, Mao, Lenin, etc.) Bin Laden’s corpse is an important specter for twenty-first century human history. I began collecting news articles on what exactly happened to Bin Laden’s dead body since I knew that controversy was sure to follow.

My first inkling that something was askew came on Monday morning when National Public Radio reported that Bin Laden received a sea burial with full Muslim funeral rites. I’m not a Muslim burial rites specialist but at no time have I ever read about a Muslim burial at sea. The Death Reference Desk has certainly covered contemporary (mostly American) Muslim burial practices and you can read that information here. But even the most contemporary, American Muslim traditions still hew to much older Islamic funeral traditions.

Over the course of last week much back and forth ensued over what exactly happened to Bin Laden’s dead body and how, if at all, it conformed to Islamic funeral practices. Slate.com’s Explainer column posted one of the first good pieces on the entire concept: Bin Laden Sleeps With the Fishes. Central to what occurred was a choice by US Government Officials (I can only assume that this starts with President Obama) that burying Bin Laden anywhere would be problematic. This is a point that many people discussed so I won’t belabor it.

There is one place, however, that I imagine could be used for a “proper” burial and that is Guantanamo Bay. But even mentioning that scenario would create global havoc. That said, I bet money that Gitmo got mentioned by someone and then quickly passed over.

As a result, Osama Bin Laden’s dead body got put in the ocean because the United States wanted to get rid of it. I don’t think that the narrative is much more complicated than that. The use of Muslim funeral rites are nice but what happened to Bin Laden’s body was not a particularly Muslim burial.

Here’s the rub: that might not be a problem. In Sunday’s New York Times, Vanderbilt University history professor Leor Halevi wrote an a particularly good op/ed piece on this very topic. The link is at the top of the page. Halevi’s article is the best that I have come across to date.

Since not everyone can use the Times anymore, here is the most interesting section:

….Bin Laden’s religious status is a matter of contention among Muslims. On one end of the spectrum are Muslims who consider him an outsider to Islam: if not quite an apostate, a terrorist whose right to an official Muslim prayer is debatable at best. (In 2005 the Islamic Commission of Spain essentially excommunicated Bin Laden, arguing that he should not be treated as a Muslim.) They must find it as perplexing as I do that the United States government granted the man it identified not as a Muslim, but as a “mass murderer of Muslims,” the dubious honor of a quasi-Islamic funeral.

On the other end are Muslims who believe that Bin Laden is now enjoying the blessings of martyrdom. From a theological perspective, it matters little to them how Americans on the aircraft carrier Carl Vinson disposed of the corpse.

Which is all to say that Bin Laden’s burial was doctrinally irrelevant to some Muslims, and confusing to others. Most of the rest feel uneasy. Perhaps the United States could not have avoided that. But a deeper understanding of the history of Islam’s sacred law could have prevented us from seeming so at sea.

Here is what I know for sure: by the middle of this coming week everyone in America will be talking about something else and that over time conversations will come and go, mostly amongst academics, on whether or not Osama Bin Laden got a proper funeral.

The more immediate political question focuses on whether or not the photo(s) of Bin Laden’s dead body should be released. This question, too, will go away by the middle of the week. The photos were not released now but they will surface in the future. How soon is an open question but we will eventually see the images.

The On The Media program at the top has several good radio segments on Bin Laden, his dead body, and the future of his memory.

I have a hunch that Meg, Kim, and I will be discussing Osama Bin Laden’s dead body again in the near future since America has a long history of dealing with the infamous dead and in ways that keep those infamous dead bodies very much alive.

Photo credit: Mark Musarella, Caroline Wimmer/SIlive.com

An instant was all it took to post the photo.

The photo I am referring to is the one taken by Mark Musarella. In March of 2009, Musarella—a then retired police officer and EMT from Staten Island, NY—snapped a photo of the beaten and strangled body of Caroline Wimmer in her apartment and posted it to his Facebook page. While the photo was taken down fairly quickly, the implications—legal, sociological and moral—are still being sorted out to this day.

While Musarella’s motivations for taking the photo are unclear, his instantaneous ability to share it make it profoundly clear the frightening speed at which lives can be changed forever. Posting the photo to Facebook—even for the short time it was up—allowed the perpetrator, even unintentionally—to re-victimize a family still grieving for their murdered daughter.

The New York Times ran a story this past week about the crime and the Wimmer family’s attempt to sue Facebook to get the gruesome picture back or have it destroyed. In Facebook’s vernacular, the photo is considered “intellectual property”, although a Facebook spokesperson now claims that the photo was removed long ago with no other copies remaining on any of its servers.

But I wonder about that. Here’s a 2009 article from PC World about Facebook’s track record with user’s deleted photos and a more recent article via Arstechnica.com revealing a 16 month or more lag time. Facebook says it is “working with” its CDN [content delivery network] partner to “significantly reduce the amount of time that backup copies persist.” This is obviously of little comfort to the Wimmer family and precisely why, I imagine, they are suing.

More and more, society is grappling with issues around death and dying in a technological age. Crissy Chriscitiello, Caroline Wimmer’s sister, was quoted in the NY Times as saying, “Everyone is all about technology. “What about morals?” We here at Death Ref have been posting about the intersection of death and the digital life for a while. Take a look at our “death + technology” or “death + the web” categories to view past posts. This June, the Centre for Death & Society (Bath, U.K.) will host a conference titled “Death & Dying in the Digital Age”—at which our very own Dr. John Troyer will present. It will be an engaging conference—hope you can make it.

The Suicide Tourist
Frontline (March 22, 2011)

On March 22, 2011, Frontline will re-broadcast its brilliant documentary The Suicide Tourist. This is an exceptionally well done documentary (even for Frontline) and it captures the end of one man’s life, Craig Ewert, with an unflinching gaze. I watched it last year. Unfortunately, the website version of the documentary is only available in America, which is too bad because everyone should watch this Frontline piece.

Here is the official explainer for The Suicide Tourist:

“I am dying. … There is no sense in trying to deny that fact,” 59-year-old Craig Ewert says of his rapid deterioration just months after being diagnosed with ALS, a motor neuron disorder often referred to as Lou Gehrig’s disease.

“I’m not tired of living,” explains Ewert, a retired computer science professor. “I’m tired of the disease, but I’m not tired of living. And I still enjoy it enough that I’d like to continue. But the thing is that I really can’t.”

Directed by Academy Award-winning filmmaker John Zaritsky, The Suicide Tourist is a portrait of Ewert’s final days as the Chicago native pursues a physician-assisted suicide in the one place where it’s legal for foreigners to come to end their lives: Switzerland. With unique access to Dignitas, the Swiss nonprofit that has helped more than 1,000 people die since 1998, The Suicide Tourist follows Ewert as he debates the morality — and confronts the reality — of choosing to die before his disease further ravages his body, and he loses the option to die without unbearable suffering.

“At this point, I’ve got two choices,” Ewert reasons. “If I go through with it, I die, as I must at some point. If I don’t go through with it, my choice is essentially to suffer and to inflict suffering on my family and then die — possibly in a way that is considerably more stressful and painful than this way. So I’ve got death, and I’ve got suffering and death. You know, this makes a whole lot of sense to me.”

Assisted suicide is legal in Switzerland and several other countries, as well as in two U.S. states. But only Switzerland allows outsiders to come in to end their lives, leading to criticism about “suicide tourism.” The Swiss government has recently countered by imposing greater restrictions on the sorts of cases Swiss doctors can approve for suicide, largely limiting it to those in the late stages of terminal illness who feel their lives have become unbearable — the same standard that’s in place in Oregon and Washington state.

“There are people who will look at this and say: ‘No. Suicide is wrong. God has forbidden it. You cannot play God and take your own life.’” Craig Ewert anticipates some of the objections to the act he’s preparing to carry out. “But you know what? This ventilator is playing God. If I had lived without access to technology, chances are I would be dead now.”

As Ewert journeys through Switzerland and is wheeled into the Zurich apartment rented by Dignitas where he will drink the lethal sedative that will end his life, his wife, Mary, stands by his side. She is there to kiss him goodbye and wish him a “safe journey” as the medication takes hold and his eyes close for the final time. “In a sense, I lost Craig six months ago as he was,” Mary Ewert explains. “[These last months] we probably had more of one another than maybe in the past. … You know, there may have been some people who still think, well, I wouldn’t have done that, or he shouldn’t have done that, or something. But if they felt that way, they didn’t say anything to me about it. … I [still] feel his presence. …”

The entire story is presented without sentimentality or moral judgement. It forthrightly and honestly follows Craig Ewert and his wife Mary as they travel to Dignitas in Switzerland. Many Death Reference Desk readers will have come across Dignitas either on Death Ref or in other situations. Dignitas was founded in 1998 by Ludwig Minelli and it remains one of the few places in the world that individuals can travel to, in order to end their life without hiding. Ludwig Minelli appears in the documentary and you can read a longer interview with him here.

The documentary speaks for itself, so I won’t drone on and on.

But watch it.

For those who are interested, the state of Oregon has now published its official 2010 Death with Dignity Act statistics. This is the annual report that Oregon files, as required by the DWDA, documenting how many individuals used the law and for what reasons.

These statistics are worth reading too.

The Samaritans, a confidential, emotional support service serving the U.K. and Ireland, launched a partnership with Facebook this past week. Now, any Facebook user who suspects another Facebook user may be suicidal or experiencing other emotional crises, can report it to the Facebook Help Center. Other suicide prevention organizations are also listed via the Help Center including the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline in the U.S., Kirkens SOS in Norway and Befrienders.org serving other countries.

As reported in The Guardian, Samaritans chief executive Catherine Johnstone said:

“Through the popularity of Facebook, we are harnessing the power of friendship so people can get help. As a friend you are better placed to know whether someone close to you is struggling to cope or even feeling suicidal.”

The impetus behind the move is the Simone Back case, among others. On Christmas Day of last year, Back, of Brighton, England told her 1,048 Facebook friends “Took all my pills, be dead soon, bye bye everyone.” In the ensuing hours, no one went to Ms. Back’s aid. According to The Telegraph, “Some users of the site even taunted the 42-year-old over her final status update instead of trying to save her, calling her a “liar” and saying the fatal overdose was “her choice”. Some out of town friends implored online that she give them her address and/or phone number, but by the time her body was discovered the next day, it was too late.

BBC News aired a segment showing just how the system works. The mechanism for reporting is a bit cumbersome as Facebook is obviously trying to walk a fine line between having the service be too visible or too discreet. Although, in its test phase, several people reported suicidal concerns to the Help Center even before an official announcement was made. It will be interesting to see if statistics about Help Center usage for this purpose will be shared with the public and whether this will set a precedent for other social networks.