Depression’s Connection to Self-Harming Behavior in Adolescents

Self-harming behavior amongst adolescents has increased in prevalence throughout America. There is a direct connection between depression and self-harming behaviors in adolescent students. The most common reasons why adolescents participate in self-injury are as a coping mechanism, a means of relief, for the regulation of feelings, self-punishment, attention seeking and sensation seeking. There is often a link between depressive symptoms and negative life events or past trauma. Multiple methods of self-harm are often performed by students and may be carried out several times over the course of many months, the techniques used vary greatly. Schools are one of the most important institutions that are in a position to help-self injurers. In this paper I will look at the causes, effects and possible preventative methods of self-injurious behavior

Detecting critical responses from deliberate self-harm videos on YouTube

YouTube is one of the leading social media platforms and online spaces for people who self-harm to search and view deliberate self-harm videos, share their experience and seek help via comments. These comments may contain information that signals a commentator could be at risk of potential harm. Due to a large amount of responses generated from these videos, it is very challenging for social media teams to respond to a vulnerable commentator who is at risk. We considered this issue as a multi-class problem and triaged viewers' comments into one of four severity levels. Using current state-of-the-art classifiers, we propose a model enriched with psycho-linguistic and sentiment features that can detect critical comments in need of urgent support. On average, our model achieved up to 60% precision, recall, and f1-score which indicates the effectiveness of the model

The influence of online images on self-harm: A qualitative study of young people aged 16-24

To date, research on the role of the Internet in self-harm has focused on young people's interaction via the medium of text, with limited consideration of the effect of images. This qualitative study explores how young people understand and use online images of self-harm. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with a community sample of 21 individuals aged 16–24 living in Wales, UK, with a previous history of self-harm. Interviewees reported the role of the Internet in normalising young people's self-harm. Images rather than textual interactions are the primary reason cited for using the Internet for self-harm purposes. Images invoke a physical reaction and inspire behavioural enactment, with Tumblr, which permits the sharing of images by anonymous individuals, being the preferred platform. Viewing online images serves a vital role in many young people's self-harm, as part of ritualistic practice. Online prevention and intervention need to attend to the importance of images

Sensing Human Sentiment via Social Media Images: Methodologies and Applications

abstract: Social media refers computer-based technology that allows the sharing of information and building the virtual networks and communities. With the development of internet based services and applications, user can engage with social media via computer and smart mobile devices. In recent years, social media has taken the form of different activities such as social network, business network, text sharing, photo sharing, blogging, etc. With the increasing popularity of social media, it has accumulated a large amount of data which enables understanding the human behavior possible. Compared with traditional survey based methods, the analysis of social media provides us a golden opportunity to understand individuals at scale and in turn allows us to design better services that can tailor to individuals’ needs. From this perspective, we can view social media as sensors, which provides online signals from a virtual world that has no geographical boundaries for the real world individual's activity. One of the key features for social media is social, where social media users actively interact to each via generating content and expressing the opinions, such as post and comment in Facebook. As a result, sentiment analysis, which refers a computational model to identify, extract or characterize subjective information expressed in a given piece of text, has successfully employs user signals and brings many real world applications in different domains such as e-commerce, politics, marketing, etc. The goal of sentiment analysis is to classify a user’s attitude towards various topics into positive, negative or neutral categories based on textual data in social media. However, recently, there is an increasing number of people start to use photos to express their daily life on social media platforms like Flickr and Instagram. Therefore, analyzing the sentiment from visual data is poise to have great improvement for user understanding. In this dissertation, I study the problem of understanding human sentiments from large scale collection of social images based on both image features and contextual social network features. We show that neither visual features nor the textual features are by themselves sufficient for accurate sentiment prediction. Therefore, we provide a way of using both of them, and formulate sentiment prediction problem in two scenarios: supervised and unsupervised. We first show that the proposed framework has flexibility to incorporate multiple modalities of information and has the capability to learn from heterogeneous features jointly with sufficient training data. Secondly, we observe that negative sentiment may related to human mental health issues. Based on this observation, we aim to understand the negative social media posts, especially the post related to depression e.g., self-harm content. Our analysis, the first of its kind, reveals a number of important findings. Thirdly, we extend the proposed sentiment prediction task to a general multi-label visual recognition task to demonstrate the methodology flexibility behind our sentiment analysis model.Dissertation/ThesisDoctoral Dissertation Computer Science 201

Restorative Justice: Theory, Processes, and Application in Rural Alaska

An exploration of the principles behind using restorative justice as an alternate form of sentencing in criminal cases, with a focus particularly on how restorative justice might be of benefit in rural Alaska. Includes a bibliography. A sidebar, "Restorative Justice Programs and Sentencing", looks at amendments to Alaska Rules of Criminal Procedure 11(i) and Delinquency Rules 21(d)(3) and 23(f) which describe the requirements for referral to a restorative justice program as part of the sentencing process.[Introduction] / Restorative Justice / Restorative Processes / Victim-Offender Mediation / Conferencing / Circles / Restorative Processes in Rural Alaska / Conclusion / SIDEBARS / Restorative Justice Programs and Sentencing / Change to Alaska Criminal Rule 11 / Restorative Justice ReferencesYe

“It’s cool to feel sad”: A thematic analysis of the social media experiences of university students who have self-harmed

Background: Suicide and self-harm rates amongst young people have been identified as a public mental health concern with emerging links to social media use. Aim: The current study aimed to qualitatively explore the social media experiences of university students who have self-harmed, as they have been identified as a group vulnerable to suicide. Method: Semi-structured interviews were completed at two time points with students aged 21 and under who have self-harmed whilst at university, with transcripts of interviews analysed using reflexive thematic analysis (Braun & Clarke, 2021). Results: Three organising themes were identified: 1) Instagram vs reality, 2) A double-edged sword, 3) Curating online spaces. The analysis provided a developmental overview of patterns across students’ experiences online, identifying negative social comparisons, the romanticisation of mental illness, and the development of their insight and rules to engage with social media in a helpful way. Conclusions: The study provided an insight into the evolution of the online lives of students who have self-harmed, highlighting key modifiable risk factors that researchers, policymakers and clinicians could meaningfully target to promote ‘digital hygiene’ and the reduction of potential harm from social media

Intellectual Property, Globalization, and Left-Libertarianism

Intellectual property has become the apple of discord in today’s moral and political debates. Although it has been approached from many different perspectives, a final conclusion has not been reached. In this paper I will offer a new way of thinking about intellectual property rights (IPRs), from a left-libertarian perspective. My thesis is that IPRs are not (natural) original rights, aprioric rights, as it is usually argued. They are derived rights hence any claim for intellectual property is weaker than the correlative duties attached to self-ownership and world-ownership rights, which are of crucial importance in any left-libertarian view. Moreover, IPRs lack priority in front of these two original rights and should be overridden by stronger claims of justice. Thus, as derived rights, IPRs should not benefit of strong enforcement like any original rights especially if it could be in the latters’ detriment