Suicide prevention is everyone's business: Challenges and opportunities for Google

The internet has become a key frontier for large-scale, public health efforts in suicide prevention. Market-leading technology companies, such as Google, are developing interventions to deliver support information to those experiencing suicidal distress, but the precise technology, i.e. algorithms, behind this are proprietary. This raises important ethical questions regarding whether such large-scale public health interventions for suicide prevention should be happening behind closed corporate doors when this makes the evaluation of such interventions extremely difficult. Furthermore, as illustrated by Arendt et al. (2019), initiatives such as Google's Suicide Prevention Result (SPR) appear not to work in circumstances in which they could be of significant potential benefit, such as when individuals are searching for details of celebrity suicides. In the current commentary, we discuss ways in which the SPR can be optimized, based on existing evidence regarding suicide-related internet use. We go on to discuss the ethical issues of large technology companies becoming key players in suicide prevention and critically consider how online public health initiatives of this kind are able to be evaluated.