Facilitating Suicide Prevention in Online Spaces
A Special Issue of Behavioral Sciences (ISSN 2076-328X) belonging to the section "Psychiatric, Emotional and Behavioral Disorders".
Deadline for manuscript submissions: 15 March 2027 | Viewed by 814
Editor
Interests: suicide prevention; online mental health support; lived experience; suicidology; online peer support; suicide capability; suicide distress
Special Issue Information
Dear Colleagues,
I am pleased to invite submissions for this Special Issue, “Facilitating Suicide Prevention in Online Spaces.” It seeks to advance rigorous, interdisciplinary scholarship examining how suicide prevention is or can be facilitated or transformed within digitally mediated environments.
Online spaces are increasingly used by individuals experiencing suicidal distress to seek connection, support, and assistance. These spaces now comprise a broad ecosystem that includes peer support communities, social media platforms, moderated mental health services, and AI‑enabled systems such as automated monitoring tools and conversational agents. Despite their growing centrality to help‑seeking, online suicide prevention environments are frequently understood through a dominant lens of risk. This framing emphasizes perceived risks that users bring into online spaces, risks associated with exposure to suicide‑related content, and risks assumed to emerge through human–human and human–technology interactions.
Consequently, many approaches to online suicide safety prioritise restriction, deterrence, automation, and content suppression. These approaches often rest on assumptions that suicide‑related content or interaction is inherently harmful, despite limited evidence that harm can be attributed to content, technology, or online engagement in isolation. Such approaches may inadvertently discourage help‑seeking, limit opportunities for relational support, and obscure the behavioural, psychological, and social processes through which safety and care are enacted online.
The aim of this Special Issue is to advance our theoretical, empirical, and applied understanding of suicide prevention in online spaces. Contributions should examine how psychological, interpersonal, and social processes shape experiences of risk, safety, support, help‑seeking, escalation, and de‑escalation in digitally mediated contexts. Online spaces are conceptualized broadly to include human‑mediated, AI‑supported, and hybrid environments.
This Special Issue seeks submissions that explore online spaces as both informal and formal contexts for suicide prevention, including environments in which AI systems are embedded within practices of detection, triage, moderation, or support provision.
Topics of interest include, but are not limited to, the following:
- Suicide prevention practices in online and digitally mediated contexts.
- Patterns and outcomes of suicide‑related online use, including associations with suicide risk, and disclosure.
- Help‑seeking behaviours and trajectories in online suicide‑related contexts.
- Peer support, moderation, and governance in online spaces.
- Psychological and interpersonal processes underlying online suicide‑related engagement.
- Interactional, discursive, or relational analyses of suicide talk in digital environments.
- Qualitative and mixed‑methods investigations examining lived experience, meaning‑making, and perceived protective functions of online engagement.
- The role of algorithms, chatbots, or automated systems in shaping suicide prevention practices and experiences.
- Human–technology interaction and behavioral responses to suicidal distress.
- Ethical, regulatory, and policy considerations in online and technology‑mediated suicide prevention.
This Special Issue welcomes original empirical research, theoretical and conceptual papers, clinical and practice‑based perspectives, methodological contributions, and interdisciplinary analyses.
I look forward to receiving your submissions.
Prof. Dr. Andrea Lamont-Mills
Guest Editor
Manuscript Submission Information
Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 250 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for assessment.
Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-anonymized peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Behavioral Sciences is an international peer-reviewed open access monthly journal published by MDPI.
Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2400 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.
Keywords
- suicide prevention
- online help‑seeking
- digital mental health
- social media use
- peer support
- human–technology interaction
- lived experience
- artificial intelligence–mediated support
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