Molly Russell suicide & Debian Frans Pop, Lucy Wayland, social media deaths
One of the key features of the news reporting are the words of an expert witness who reviewed the online content and reported that he was unable to sleep.
Over the summer, I was one of the Debian volunteers reviewing evidence of the Frans Pop suicide. I wrote some of the blogs about it and I created the Debian.Day web site with some of Frans' last emails.
There are thousands of emails in the threads leading up to Frans' first and second resignation. I emphasized that in one of the blogs. We can imagine the participants in those discussions suffering from the same sleepless nights that haunted the expert witness, a psychiatrist, in the Molly Russell inquest.
Despite Frans sending that last email the night before Debian.Day, some people insist on deflecting responsibility with comments asserting that "Frans had his own reasons" for the suicide. Nobody gave any examples of those reasons. In fact, everybody has reasons to contemplate suicide. Google and Ubuntu have both applied unreasonable pressure on volunteers. Their business practices keep people up at night and they keep people at work seven days per week. If somebody is suffering from depression or thinking about suicide, they need that energy to protect themselves. Sadly, Debian harassment culture has stolen the energy from some people.