Suffering Alone Together: An Analysis of Anonymity, Suicide Discourse, and Social Support in an Online Community

In this dissertation, I employ a mixed methods approach to investigate how people seek online help for suicide (i.e., being suicidal or suicidal others), the contexts they write about, and how people provide support. This dissertation analyzes structural sources of misery (defined as painful emotions, such as sadness, anxiety, and depression) and suicidal behavior, the role of anonymity in the presentation of self in online help-seeking for suicide, and the provision of online social support in response to suicidal behavior. The locus for my research is the online community SuicideWatch (SW) on the Reddit platform. I employ computational (“big data”), qualitative, and quantitative analyses of textual data collected from SW.Placing the literatures of medical sociology, suicidology, and cultural sociology in conversation, this dissertation engages an analysis of public online suicide discourse within a support community to highlight new mediums for help-seeking in the case of stigma. I highlight the reasons people are considering suicide and identify structural sources of misery by analyzing texts concerning people who sought online support. To better understand online contexts, this work focuses on discourse and identity. By emphasizing the study of how people discuss suicide online, with special focus on the contexts in which people discuss with others their thoughts and intents about suicide, this dissertation makes key contributions to the literature. I investigated the following research questions: Is anonymity important for seeking online social support? How do people write about suicide online? What are the structural sources of misery and suicidal behavior? What online help-seeking strategies do people employ? How do online support communities respond to general expressions of misery and explicit suicidal behavior? I developed hypotheses by engaging with the literature reviewed in this dissertation. For each major topic studied--the structural sources of miser