It’s Dr. Kevorkian channeled through the Internet, and it’s chilling.
The New York Times ran a front page story Friday about a Faribault, Minn., man who is charged with two counts of aiding in a suicide. But the newspaper used the case of practical nurse William Melchert-Dinkel to delve into a new phenomenon: Pro-suicide chat rooms that encourage the despondent and depressed to take their own lives. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/14/us/14suicide.html?hp
The topic of suicide is of great interest to me as an advocate of those with brain injury, because brain-damaged people often get clinically depressed, and out of that despair they think about committing suicide as a way to end their misery.
What the Web gives us today is the equivalent of a mob standing on a sidewalk watching someone out on a skyscraper ledge, yelling like a chorus for him to jump. With the Internet, you can be 1,000 miles from someone contemplating suicide and still tell them “to jump.” It’s rather convenient,
In the case of Melchert-Dinkel, he is charged with assisting in the suicide of a man, Mark Drybrough, in Coventry, England. Melchert-Dinkin, posing as a young depressed woman under the alias “Li Dao,” offered Drybrough tips on how to hang himself from a door.
Melchert-Dinkin, this time using the name “Cami,” entered into a suicide pact with a young Canadian woman. The woman killed herself by jumping off a bridge, under the delusion that Cami would commit suicide the next day by hanging herself per their pact.
It may also shake your faith in humanity more than a bit, as it did mine, to read about another example cited in The Times. One poor lost soul killed himself in front of a webcam as others, who I would call evil, watched.
Ironically, Melchert-Dinkel apparently did feel some remorse over his murderous actions. After he was first questioned by police, the now-suspended nurse went to a local emergency room and claimed he was addicted to suicide Internet sites and “was feeling guilty about the advice he had given people to end their lives,” according to The Times.
