Study Links Online Behavior to Events of Suicide

Online communication has increased rapidly over the past decade, especially during the pandemic, and concerning behaviors have surfaced. In an attempt to better understand the impetus of these behaviors, Bark and the CDC examined the online activities of middle and high school-aged children for just over a year.

The study compared two groups of children---those with a high-severity of suicide or self-harm alert against those without---using data from school issued devices. They found that the high-severity group of students had shown prior risky behaviors online, such as bullying, violence, drug-related content, hate speech, profanity, sexual content, depression, and low-severity self-harm. 

"Rates of suicide and self-harm have been rising among young people in the U.S. over the past decade," said lead author Steven Sumner, M.D., of the CDC. "It's important that we pay attention to and really understand the new online risk factors that children are facing today in order to strengthen our prevention efforts."

A copy of the full-text article published in JAMA Network Open can be found here. 

We've never been more proud of our partner, Bark Technologies, then with the publication of a national study in conjunction with the Centers for Disease Control. 

About Bark
Bark is an award-winning monitoring and screen time management service founded in 2015 by a parent who was looking for a way to help keep his kids safe online while preserving their privacy. Bark covers 30+ of today's most popular social media platforms, as well as texts, chat, email, YouTube, and files contained in Google Drive. Bark also monitors images, text within images, audio, and video, and has recently added screen time management and web filtering to its suite of safety solutions.