The social networking giant, Facebook recently released an app to help out people who are mentally or emotionally depressed. In general, people with this kind of feeling generally possess a weak state of mind and are prone to take incorrect decisions. Some of them, in a fear to face the troubles tend to end their life and commit suicides. Facebook took a step ahead in order to help such people through their chat tool.
Facebook launched a program in December, 2011 through which it offers a counseling for the people with suicidal tendencies. This app enables the users to instantly connect with a crisis counselor through Facebookâs ‘Chat’ messaging tool.
The aim of this change is to help the people and improve the safety on the site which has more than 800 million users all across the globe. The developers have observed the increased number of suicidal deaths in US. According to USA surgeon general, nearly 100 Americans die by suicide every day, which makes 36,035 deaths every year. While Yahoo and Google provide the users with contact number of the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline as the first result when someone searches for “suicide” using their sites, Facebook has taken a more effective step of online counseling. Since the depressed person does not communicate with the counselor directly, or never see him personally, he feels more liberal to talk to that person and share his views. Moreover, Facebook also directs users to the hotline or encourage friends to call law enforcement if they perceived someone was about to do harm.