In April, Demi Moore twittered to stop a suicidal fan. In China this week, one netizen reached out to another with another happy ending. The upside of “internet addiction?”
In a QQ chat room, man says he wants to take his own life
Beijing netizen calls the police
Chongqing firefighters rescue him at his house
June 1, 2009
Source: Chongqing Times
Yesterday evening, a Beijing man, Mr. Liu, opened QQ to meet his friend Yangyang (an alias), a man from Chongqing he’s chatted with online for the past year. “We chatted for an hour and Yangyang’s words started getting strange. Several times he brought up suicide and said that his body was getting cold.” After thinking it over, Mr. Liu used his phone to call the police. In Chongqing, firefighters rushed to the scene and successfully saved the suicidal man.
Netizen repeatedly talks of the pressure he’s under
“Yangyang and I know each other from QQ,” sad Mr. Liu. After more than year, the two gradually became good friends, “we talked about everything, but the chat that night make feel more and more uneasy.”
“Yangyang started by saying that he felt he was under a lot of pressure in life.” Mr. Liu recalled, “I tried to console him, telling him that the pressures in life don’t matter — the important thing is that we face them!” Mr. Liu continued to console his friend and kept trying to change the subject, but Yangyang kept coming back to this topic. “He kept saying that his work was getting more and more unstable and he was making less and less money. The pressure he was under was growing and he felt he didn’t have the confidence to go on living.”
On QQ, blunt words about losing the will to live
After a long period of quiet, Mr. Liu saw that Yangyang had not said anything and he continued to try and intercede, but Yangyang remained silent. After more than 10 minutes, a string of words appeared on the computer screen that alarmed Mr. Liu.
Mr. Liu said that Yangyang wrote, “In this lifetime, I can’t apologize enough to my parents, but I’ve just now made arrangements for them. I’ve thought for a long time. I’ve over and over tried to give myself the faith to live, but I haven’t found any.” Then this appeared on the screen: ” If tomorrow you can’t get in touch with me, then there won’t be any way to reach me again in this lifetime. I will have already left you all.” Mr. Liu immediately picked up his phone and called Yangyang’s mobile phone. “I called more than 10 times and there was no answer.”
As he was worrying, Mr. Liu saw another string of words on his computer screen: “All around me feels very peaceful. My body’s getting cold.” Around 10pm after thinking over the situation, Mr. Liu decided to call the police. “At first I thought he was kidding, but these last hopeless sentences convinced me not to hesitate.”
Firefighters and the people’s police arrive at his door to persuade him to stop
After Chongqing’s 119 Command Center was alerted, the officers called the phone number that Mr. Liu had given them several times with no response. Because Mr. Liu didn’t know Yangyang’s exact address, the fire department command center relied on information from his phone registration and other sources to find his home in a neighborhood in “Jiulong Poshi Pingqiao”.
“When we arrived on the scene, we knocked on the door for a long time before someone answered.” When the firefighters and the police entered the room, they discovered that the person who’d opened the door was a young man in his 20s.
“What’s the point! You are so young. If you kill yourself, have you thought about your poor parents?” The firefighters and the police saw the man’s depressed expression. They tell him about the consequences of his death — that it would be an unbearable sorrow for his parents and so on. The man all of a sudden collapsed in a chair and sat silently for a long time before opening his mouth to speak. “Thank you. I spent so much time thinking about this one most difficult outcome. I won’t casually take my own life!” The firefighters and the police left the room and waited outside for a period of time to determine that the man’s mood had stabilized before leaving.
Yesterday, when Mr. Liu found out that he had succeeded in being his friend’s lifeline, he was extremely excited: “I get to keep chatting with him. There’s nothing more important than life. If only a person lives, there is nothing that can’t be overcome.”
Inspiring. From my own personal experience I have to say that young Mr. Liu is an exception. Congratulations to him and here’s to hoping that Yangyang works through his problems and finds his way in “life”.