Occidental student Liv G (junior), who has asked to keep their last name anonymous for privacy, said that a suicide prevention bot which they developed for the messaging app Discord has managed to reach over 2500 online communities around the world. The program uses machine learning to scan messages in chat boards for possible signs of suicidal intent, Liv said. If a message is flagged as indicating distress, the bot provides users with a list of mental health hotlines in over 200 countries and territories.
According to Liv, making the bot accessible to as many people as possible was a key part of the development process.
“I found this list of suicide lifelines and I just went all the way down the list and added every single one, along with information on each organization, how to donate and so on,” Liv said. “Unfortunately some countries still don’t have a lifeline, which is just awful.”
Liv said they first started working on the program during the pandemic, when they were in ninth grade. According to Liv, working on the bot started as a way to improve their coding skills, but eventually grew into a larger project which they still work on to this day.
“Back in 2020, I was trying to get better at coding, and I realized that you could make a Discord bot using Javascript,” Liv said. “I was looking for a way to apply that, and I realized that mental health was a huge issue. There are a lot of people online who could really use some help that’s just there in the background, just in case.”
Liv said they have worked at the Information and Technology Services help desk since their first year at Occidental. Vice President of ITS and Chief Information Officer James Uhrich said Liv is an excellent and innovative worker with a strong technical skillset.
According to Uhrich, the ITS team originally hired Liv because they independently discovered a flaw in the college’s student directory system.
“When Liv got here during their first semester, they didn’t apply for a job with us, but they uncovered some procedural issues with one of our tools, contacted us and told us, ‘You’re doing these things wrong.’ We realized they were right, and so we agreed that we should hire them,” Uhrich said. “Here is this smart, creative problem solver looking for things to improve in the community. That’s exactly who we need.”
ITS Director of User Experience Jacob Sargent said that Liv stands out to the ITS team because of their proactive approach to problem solving and ability to connect disparate systems together. According to Sargent, Liv’s familiarity with day-to-day student life has helped them identify problems and safety concerns with the college’s IT system that would not have occurred to full-time staff at ITS otherwise.
“I was so impressed with their approach,” Sargent said. “Instead of being upset about a problem and handing it off to us, they went out of their way to systematically review the security of student data within our systems and found something that we hadn’t previously considered.”
According to Sargent, Liv realized that because student ID numbers were publicly visible on college resources like Raftr, anyone with access to the app could find and use the numbers to make transactions in the Marketplace or Tiger Cooler.
“That’s been fixed now, because as a student, Liv understood how people actually use this information in a way I don’t think we would have as staff,” Sargent said.
Although the suicide prevention bot for Discord was their first big coding project, Liv said their experience with coding goes all the way back to their early childhood.
“I’ve been coding since I was really little with a program called Scratch, which is made to teach simple coding with a block system,” Liv said.
Liv said they think online messaging forums provide a unique opportunity for people struggling with their mental health to seek guidance and counsel from their peers without the fear of judgement they might face in the real world.
“I think in a way being online helps you to talk and be more open about things you may not talk to anyone about in real life, because you have this sense of anonymity,” Liv said. “I’m just trying to help in any way that I can. A lot of people die from suicide every year, and if could make that number go down by just one, then that would be worth all the time in the world.”
Contact Adam Pildal at pildal@oxy.edu
