In the huge machine of the Internet, there are a large number of people who are potentially suicidal. They are often hidden and hard to find in real life. With the development of AI, it is possible for semantics to be analyzed, and it is also possible for this group of people to find and rescue online suicides.
Editor’s note: This article comes from “ Interface Technology “, reporter | Ke Xiaobin Sun Wenhao, Editing | Wen Yanqi.
“The sun is so big it just can’t get through, I still feel a bit cold, can you give me some temperature.”
This Weibo message was posted at 3 pm on December 7, 2019, and my mood was a little depressed. This message responded to a Weibo posted on March 18, 2012. The blogger called “Zoufan “She is a depression patient.
7 years ago, I left the world with a final sentence on Weibo and chose to leave. Although Weibo says “don’t care about my leaving”, so far, about 2,000 new messages appear in the comment area every day, among which about 500-600 messages reveal depression and despair. It has approached 2 million.
Since then, this Weibo has become a “tree hole” for negative emotions. Behind every Weibo comment is a real life that may need external rescue.
The World Health Organization (WHO) announced in 2015 that the number of people suffering from depression in China was about 54 million, accounting for about 3.8% of the total population. According to a survey by the Zhu Tingzheng team of the Institute of Psychology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, 79% of people expressing despair on the Internet think that getting help is “not unnecessary”, but that people who have never sought help account for more than 50% More than 60% of people have never been exposed to knowledge about suicide prevention.
This means that in the huge machine of the Internet, there are a large number of people who are potentially suicidal. They are often hidden and difficult to find in real life. With the development of AI, it is possible for semantics to be analyzed, and it is also possible for this group of people to find suicide online.
But how to find this part of the population and provide them with effective psychological counseling in advance to rescue suicide is still a difficult problem.
passThe road to rescue
“I already walked to the river and I wanted to jump.”
One late night in October this year, Huang Zhisheng, the head of the Shudong Rescue Team, received a message. The sender of this message was a Wuhan girl who had just been rescued by volunteers. “When standing by the river, Suddenly more than thirty strangers cared about my text messages. I thought no one cared about my death. I stood on the river bank and watched one. I cried once and cried for three hours. Finally I gave up and came back. Now, because I see another hope in life, many people still care about me. “
This is a successful suicide intervention by the Shudong Rescue Team. So far, the Shudong Rescue Team has sent more than 3,000 text messages, preventing more than 1,000 suicides.
Huang Zhisheng is the head of the Tree Cave Rescue Team and a professor at the Free University of Amsterdam. In April 2018, Huang Zhisheng started the “Tree Cave Project” for suicide intervention using artificial intelligence technology, and organized a team of more than 20 volunteers. In July of the same year, he launched his own artificial intelligence semantic analysis system, named the tree-hole robot. The tree-hole robot can analyze and screen the messages in the specific comment area of Weibo, and then the team conducts suicide intervention.
“Our tree hole robot has locked 10 grading standards. For example, level 10 suicide is in progress. Level 9 suicide has been determined. It may happen in the past two days.” Huang Zhisheng introduced to the interface reporter, The tree hole robot can automatically classify the danger level after selecting Weibo messages that are at risk of suicide, and manual intervention will be performed at levels 5 and above.
Since the tree cave robot has been online for more than a year, it has evolved from 001 to 006, and its accuracy of semantic analysis has reached 82%.
“Now we do a search every 4 hours. There are about 4,000 Weibo searches in a day, and one or two hundred of them require human intervention. Once this group of people is found, volunteers will continue to follow up. Accompany them with psychological counseling. “
At present, their team has cooperated with Sina Weibo for some time. According to Huang Zhisheng, Sina Weibo allows them to capture relevant data on Sina Weibo through AI. He said that he is discussing with Sina Weibo to establish artificial The possibility of an intelligent joint laboratory.
Compared with Huang Zhisheng’s team, Zhu Tingzhang is more cautious. Although he started suicide rescue two years earlier than Huang Zhisheng, the team has only been more than 20 people.
“Suicide intervention by a large number of unprofessional volunteers is likely to cause secondary harm to light offenders.” At present, in the Zhu Tingzhang team, volunteers who directly communicate with patients with depression need to have a level 3 psychological counselor Qualification certificate or above.
At the same time, unlike the continuous follow-up and mentoring by Huang Zhisheng’s team, in order to protect the privacy of users, they will not allow volunteers to use personal accounts to send private messages, nor establish online communities, nor do they follow long-term tracking.Only occasional follow-up.
Zhu Tingyi believes that suicide is a very complicated behavior, and excessive intervention may cause secondary harm.
Need more expertise to join
“A girl committed suicide eight times and was persuaded to come back, but in the end she said, please ask us to let her go, and she still left.” This was a rescue that made Peng Ling feel powerless. Peng Ling is the head of Hubei in the Shudong Rescue Team.
At present, the relief scope of the Shudong Rescue Team is expanding, and the number of rescue teams has also grown from more than 20 in the beginning to nearly 600 now. But most of these 600 people are volunteers, among which the core 80 volunteers are more professional psychological counselors, who are the specific leaders of rescue teams in various regions of the country.
The threshold for joining the tree cave rescue team is not high. No relevant knowledge of technology and psychology is required. As long as the motivation is pure, you can pass the interview. This makes the relief team volunteers of varying quality, which will cause trouble to the work from time to time. “We are indeed a loose organization.” Huang Zhisheng also felt a bit helpless, but now he organizes volunteers to participate in training on both the online and offline tracks every week.
“Some volunteers feel tired. Some of them want to give up in the rescue process, and some will leave the team one after another.” Peng Ling believes that high-density negative information and high-intensity work make many Volunteers who have never been professional can hardly bear it.
More importantly, as a loose organization, how to ensure the privacy of this group of people is a difficult problem that needs to be solved urgently.
“One time, a volunteer leaked the records from the rescue WeChat group, and one of the rescued people came and asked me why I talk about her. In fact, we are discussing a plan to rescue her.” Huang Zhisheng Recalling a matter involving privacy leaks, “I asked anyone in the group who leaked it, and everyone didn’t say it. I could only review it one by one. At that time, there were already one or two hundred people. Finally, I positioned myself as someone, himself I also acknowledged that he was finally removed from the team. “
This means that when the rescued person’s privacy was leaked, Huang Zhisheng did not have a good solution. “We have to use this method of cross-examination to find unruly volunteers, and now the team has grown to 600 people. This laborious method is difficult to deal with similar privacy leaks in the future,” he admitted.
In order to protect the privacy of this group of people, Zhu Tingyi’s team seems to be more restrained. Huang Zhisheng believes that letting volunteers from non-professional psychological counselors directly contact patients with depression does have the problem of patients’ privacy being leaked. However, he is more reluctant to see life disappear. “Too many people can’t follow at all.”
“We saw your comments on Weibo, are you okay now, how is your emotional state?” He Ning (a pseudonym) who was diagnosed with depression received a Weibo in 2016 entitled “Psychological