Facebook friend saves suicidal teen

A girl in the US saw a suicidal comment from a UK boy on her Facebook friends list, and within three hours he was found and taken to the hospital for treatment, The Daily Mail reports. "Shortly before 11.30pm [last] Wednesday [the 16-year-old boy] wrote: ‘I’m going away to do something I’ve been thinking about for a while then everyone will find out'." His friend knew the school he went to but not his address, so she told her parents, who contacted the British Embassy in Washington. Police local to the boy "had just a name to go on but narrowed the search to eight addresses in [his] county. Officers were dispatched to each location, and three hours after the boy had filed his Facebook message, he was found at home [conscious] " conscious but suffering the effects of a drug overdose." He has since been released from the hospital and "is recovering at home," The Daily Mail adds. The story bears out what the US's National Suicide Prevention Lifeline told me for a 2007 profile of its work with MySpace and other social sites, that peers are often the first to know when a teen's in trouble, so social network sites are a vital source of referrals to hotlines.