Parker, Damien (2022) Keeping Users Safe Online: Working with Suicidal Users in Online Forums. Honours thesis, University of Southern Queensland. (Unpublished)
Abstract
This study explores an emerging area of research aimed at understanding how individuals are kept safe in online mental health forums. Using an exploratory case study seeking to address how can an at-risk online user be kept safe when they argue “helplines never help”? Conversation analysis was used to analyse a single thread from a corpus of 34 threads from a moderated, peer-led, online mental health forum. The thread contained 115 posts between forum professional moderators and users themselves. It was selected because of what forum users and a moderator perceived was an imminent threat to the at-risk-user’s safety and their subsequent rejection of moderator safety advice through posting, “Help lines never help”. Findings identified a regular pattern of the at-risk-user rejecting a move from risk to safety. This pattern intensified with each three subsequent safety directives offered by a moderator. It was also used to reject a safety directive posted by a regularly contributing user who ‘followed up a safety message’ and adapted it to be a more affiliative/agreeable way to ‘nudge’ the at-risk-user to seek offline help. Moving an at-risk-user from risk to safety in moderated, peer-led, online mental health forums may be more complex than previously considered. From a moderator and an experienced forum users’ point of view, recognising an imminent risk of self-injury in a user’s post predicates safety responses. Posts that put safety actions alongside a user’s suicide intentions can transform the trajectory of a forum thread from suicide intention, lethal action to intention, actions of safety.
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| Item Type: | Thesis (Non-Research) (Honours) |
|---|---|
| Item Status: | Live Archive |
| Additional Information: | Current UniSQ staff and students can request access to this thesis. Please email research.repository@unisq.edu.au with a subject line of SEAR thesis request and provide: Name of the thesis requested and Your name and UniSQ email address |
| Faculty/School / Institute/Centre: | Current – Faculty of Health, Engineering and Sciences - School of Psychology and Wellbeing (1 Jan 2022 -) |
| Supervisors: | Steven Christensen |
| Qualification: | Bachelor of Psychology (Honours) |
| Date Deposited: | 06 Aug 2025 00:47 |
| Last Modified: | 06 Aug 2025 00:47 |
| Uncontrolled Keywords: | Conversation Analysis; suicide; professional moderator; online forum; rejection |
| Fields of Research (2008): | 17 Psychology and Cognitive Sciences > 1799 Other Psychology and Cognitive Sciences > 179999 Psychology and Cognitive Sciences not elsewhere classified |
| Fields of Research (2020): | 52 PSYCHOLOGY > 5299 Other psychology > 529999 Other psychology not elsewhere classified |
| URI: | https://sear.unisq.edu.au/id/eprint/52650 |
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