Reddit to introduce new suicide prevention tools

Nearly 800,000 people commit suicide each year — more than those killed by war and homicide or breast cancer according to the World Health Organisation (WHO).

In efforts to help out users, Reddit, an American social news aggregation website has announced new tools to aid with suicide prevention by teaming up with Crisis Text Line, effective from March 10.

The new feature will allow users to report others who they believe are at risk so that Reddit can provide them with suicide prevention resources.

The reported user will get a private message with suicide prevention resources and a recommendation to text CHAT to 741741, which is the number for the Crisis Text Line.

Once the Reddit user has reached out to the text line, a trained crisis counselor will be available for support.

This is not the first time social media platforms have offered to provide suicide prevention help, Facebook, Twitter and Snapchat have pages listing global suicide prevention resources.

This article originally published on The Verge.