h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

What would you do in this situation? What is the correct thing to do?

You come across a blog by accident (maybe by googling or browsing random blogs etc) and find a blog that is, essentially, a 'countdown to suicide' blog.

Should you take action, turn the over cheek, report it or what?

Being perfectly used to situations where I do not know an immediate response, I resort to the one thing that always works:

"Before I force my view on you, please tell me, what would YOU do?"

Y.

In situations like this I feel like a hybrid of buradin's ass and a centipede who's been asked which leg he will move next.

a <>???

would that be an act envolving either Richard Whitely or Miss Voderman and someone jumping off a ledge?

If so, I'd watch.

If it were a journal on this site there's already a procedure set up... Yikes the post, the moderators wouldn't hide it, but they could kick an italic out of bed at three in the morning if they felt it necessary.

On another site I'd hope they'd have a similar setup so I'd try to contact the site administrators.

I guess the question was rather, what if you came across a purely blogging site. Say, on a whim you go to some random adress like xyz.blogspot.com. Blogspot, a.k.a Blogger.com, does not have any monitoring system, as far as I know. Now, what if on XYZ, the author said something like, "Nex Monday, I will jump off my balcony, and after a 20 metre dive I will land, rather hard, I suspect, on the sidewalk, hopefully expiring on the spot." Then what do you do?

Y.

Well, do you have any way of contacting the person who wrote it?

I haven't experienced it myself but I know it has happened (and is probably still happening).

any links to this knowledge so we may share ?

i'd go along with Whisky's advice if this were an actual event

I don't know what I'd do exactly, but I have come across some fairly suicidal blogs, if not literal count downs.
If the blogger knows or suspects that particular people (friends, family) are reading their blog, I think it works a bit like the proverbial cry-for-help, or the suicide note written by someone overdosing, with the intention of it being found in time to raise the alarm.
Or the blog could simply be like a diary, somewhere to confide their darkest feelings - whether they are true or not. It could be an exploration of the feeling - like drafting suicide notes, or writing miserable songs.
I would think the blog would be part of a pattern of behaviour - other symptoms of depression, other kinds of attention seeking etc. - which together will hopefully be noticed by people closer to the blogger, who'd be more able to take action.
Or it could be pure fiction of course.

I wonder what you'd do if it was someone you knew though? Suicide is a horribly difficult thing to deal with, it isn't just about the emergency stomach pumps or whatever, its about helping someone overcome horribly serious depression over the long term. Being close to someone who is suicidal can make you feel just as helpless as someone coming across an anonymous blog by accident.

So, I guess I would post one reply, saying the kind of thing I'd say to a depressed friend . . . I see you're unhappy, there is a way out of it, when you decide to take it, there is help available, you are loved, the feeling will go away.