The man helping prevent suicide with Google adverts

Like many men, Sandy Onie has struggled with depression and anxiety. “Unfortunately, me and my family, we have a history of mental illness and suicidality.”

Things turned particularly dark one day and it was serendipity that saved him. “It was someone reaching out—a friend—just randomly. That was enough to snap me out of my train of thought and pull me back.” In the years since, Onie has often wondered what might have happened if his friend hadn’t contacted him.

A psychologist, he noticed in his research how often the hotline for Australia’s suicide prevention line would come up in his online search results—he also found that there were some keywords that didn’t trigger a link to the suicide hotline. “There’s a set of keywords that I put in pertaining to a well known location in Australia where suicides occur. Instead of giving me the hotline number, it gave me a map.”

Onie wondered about his birth country Indonesia. “I changed my country settings and one of the first results from googling ‘suicide’ was a sketchy website that talked about suicide methods.” (Many media outlets refrain from describing or giving any detail on suicide.)

What was unmissable was the number of adverts in and around the search results. Onie wondered if those ads could point to help.