[Warning: contains difficult subject matter] As Matthew van Antwerpen, a 17-year-old in suburban Dallas, struggled with remote schooling during the pandemic last year, he grew increasingly despondent. Searching online, he found a website about suicide.
“Any enjoyment or progress I make in my life simply comes across as forced,” he wrote on the site after signing up. “I know it is all just a distraction to blow time until the end.”
Roberta Barbos, a 22-year-old student at the University of Glasgow, first posted after a breakup, writing that she was “unbearably lonely.” Shawn Shatto, 25, described feeling miserable at her warehouse job in Pennsylvania. And Daniel Dal Canto, a 16-year-old in Salt Lake City, shared his fears that an undiagnosed stomach ailment might never get better.
Soon after joining, each of them was dead.
As a reporter covering mental health & a mother I am horrified by @nytimes reporting. And think if we don’t recognize & stop this we will keep losing people. (huge warning-deals with suicide) https://t.co/eFhSBEfvUQ
— Kate Snow (@tvkatesnow) December 9, 2021