A 16-year-old teenager was found dead, believed to have fallen from the third floor of a shop lot in Kuching after she conducted an online poll to decide if she should kill herself or not.

“As many as 69 per cent of the teenager’s Instagram friends had supported the decision for her to kill herself via a voting poll which was uploaded at around 3pm yesterday,” Aidil said.

The teen had reportedly posted the headline “‘Really Important, Help Me Choose D/L” on the voting poll.

“D” reportedly meant “die” while “L” stands for “live”  (Source: Malay Mail)

What happened? 

The actual story behind was not revealed to the public at the moment. In our opinion, everyone has their own story and not every story is meant to be understood by everyone. However, it’s definitely heart-breaking for a lot of us to see a teenager commit suicide. It is also an alarming issue for some parties such as parents, education authorities and society at large.

This incident has raised a huge debate globally around the usage of social media platform. People were asking to increase the scrutiny of social media platform and the top management of the social media platform was called to Court on this suicidal incident. Social Media Platform responded by saying they have and will constantly increase the measure to prevent self harm and suicide. They have built a mechanism to detect such posts, and once detected, will then delete the post and offer support if needed.

Is Social Media the ONE to blame? or the ONLY one to blame?

We can’t help pondering why would she post a poll in the social media before committing suicide but only she knows the actual answer.

If she hasn’t created that poll, will she still commit suicide? Again, only she knows the answer to it.

What happens in the social media platform doesn’t kill people, the greatest extent it can do is that it affects our emotions. Some people posted something online and wait for their friends and followers to comment and like. It’s as if the more likes they get from their post, their friends and follower approve of them being pretty, smart or whatever the post try to convey. Some people will take down the post if it didn’t gain enough likes after posting it up for an hour or so. People also get upset when there is some nasty comment about their post or when there’s some personal attack that raises from nowhere.

Who Cares?

Now, let’s put up one of the famous phrase “Who Cares” or “IDFC” that some people take as “mantra” for life. If people were to be able to live their life not affected by what other people think of them, they will be happier. This, however, is easier said than done, especially for teenagers.

IQ vs EQ

Human has intelligent quotient (IQ) and emotional quotient (EQ) that helps us succeed in life. EQ are usually developed over time, and polished with the experiences we go through in life, especially the tough situations. That’s why we often hear people say, “as you age, you are able to empathize with other better”. Older people also tend to be calmer than a teenager.

Is that all? What can we do about it?

Can we develop their EQ? Yes! To be honest, it doesn’t just grow with time. In fact, there are some adults who has very low EQ even in their later stages of life. On the opposite side, you have children who shown high EQ since young and grow into a much successful person later.

EQ is something that a lot of people shoved aside and solely focus on the academic performance of the children from young (at least the Asian parenting). What can a higher EQ helped us in life? EQ allows us to respond to challenging situations in life. When we are faced with a tough time, a person with a more resilient mindset will be able to stay strong and not give up. When something bad happened, we are able to respond by finding a solution to it and not just REACT to the situation. This is also one of the biggest difference human has with animal. Animal has no EQ, hence they REACT to situation and we human, RESPOND to situation.

In a nutshell, social media platform might not be the only thing we should look at. Instead, let’s look back at ourselves and fix us.

Note: All opinions here are only personal opinion and are not meant to offend or affect anyone’s day or happiness.