Dato Sri Fatimah Abdullah
KUCHING: There is a need to educate social media users on how to recognise cries for help among fellow netizens.
Minister of Welfare, Community Wellbeing, Women, Family and Childhood Development Dato Sri Fatimah Abdullah said this is important so that they can facilitate assistance for any social media users who are giving signs of being under a great stress or suffering from depression.
“If they cannot provide the right advice, they can help to facilitate by informing trained or qualified person and available avenue where the troubled person can go to for help and advice.
“The wrong action can cause and lead to tragic cases,” she told reporters after officiating the 2019 Sumbangsih Gawai Raya at Dewan Bukavu, Kem Penrissen here yesterday.
She said this when commenting on the tragic case involving a 16-year-old girl who allegedly leapt to her death on Monday after she ran an Instagram poll on whether she should take her own life or continue living.
A check on the teen’s Instagram account revealed that she had conducted the poll at 3pm the same day under the heading ‘REALLY IMPORTANT, Help Me Choose D/L’.
“According to a close friend of the victim, the ‘D/L’ meant ‘Death/Life’. Based on the result of the poll, 69 per cent of her social media friends chose ‘D’ and 31 per cent, ‘L’.
The Form Four student, it would seem, had been struggling with the trauma of having a broken family.
Her Indonesian mother has remarried a man who has a 15-year-old son while her father has remarried a Vietnamese and rarely returned to see her.
Fatimah, who described this as a tragic episode, said teenagers and adolescents lack the right coping skills when it comes to stress, anxiety and depression.
“What had happened was a wake-up call. We are now living in a different era. It is not just about providing support system through physical counselling. Most of the people now prefer to go for counseling through the phone where there is anonymity and others look to the social media for support,” she said.