ANALYSIS OF SOCIAL NETWORK DISCOURSE RELATED TO SUICIDAL BEHAVIOUR: A COMPARATIVE STUDY BETWEEN ITALIAN AND SPANISH ADOLESCENTS

Studies on suicide and the Internet emerged only a decade ago, and those on suicidal behaviors and social media are even more recent. Until today, all the benefits and harms related to the use of social networks and suicidal behaviors in adolescence are not fully known. However, the prevail-ing presence of social networks in youth life is promoting the development of strategies based on their use, for the intervention, detection, and prevention of suicide. The online presentation of suicidal behaviors is a sign of the importance of this phenomenon and the need to take care of it, considering that in the scientific literature there is lit-tle analysis of the relationship between suicidality and so-cial networks. Therefore, it is necessary to explore all the possibilities offered by social networks to detect the fac-tors involved in suicidal behavior. This work consists of an exploratory analysis of social discourse on Twitter based on three categories associated with suicidal behav-ior, for descriptive, preventive, and comparative purposes, between two samples of adolescents: Italian and Spanish. The extracted results show a greater number of both pro -suicide and instigator tweets in the Italian sample, com-pared to the Spanish one, while the Spanish sample ex-ceeds the Italian one in terms of anti-suicide tweets. It is suggested to keep on researching the useful responses to online communications from adolescents and into other possibilities offered by social media platforms in the anal-ysis of youth suicide.