Spotlight on Linguistics: Suicide
June 5th 2025 | 6min read
Linguistics: A Vital Tool in Spotting Early Signs of Suicide and Self-Harm
At Senso.cloud, our mission is to become a leader in online safeguarding by helping to keep children safe in digital spaces.
In an age where students increasingly express their thoughts, struggles, and emotions on social media, safeguarding must extend beyond physical spaces to the online world, where early warning signs of mental health issues often emerge. That’s why we’re committed to identifying concerns before they escalate into serious issues, allowing safeguarding staff to offer support to students as quickly as possible.
By harnessing new technology, language data, and expert insight, we aim to detect subtle indicators of risk, especially those that might otherwise go unnoticed. One of the most powerful tools helping us to achieve this is linguistic analysis, which can reveal early indicators of mental health struggles, including signs of suicide and self-harm. In this blog, Dr Charlotte-Rose Kennedy, our Safeguarding Language Specialist, explores how her linguistic analysis is helping us to uncover hidden patterns in online communication, and how these insights are contributing to smarter, more sensitive safeguarding solutions in schools.
Uncovering Subtle Expressions of Suicidal Ideation Through Linguistic Analysis
"I set out analysing a 1.1-million-word dataset of online posts about suicide with the aim of uncovering some of the more subtle expressions children suffering from suicidal thoughts could type into their online devices."
One interesting finding was the frequent use of the adverb ‘anymore’ – it occurred over 1000 times and usually in close proximity to verbs such as ‘be’, ‘do’ and ‘go’. Interestingly, while the words ‘anymore’, ‘be’, ‘do’ and ‘go’ don’t represent obvious safeguarding concerns, my research suggests that they can potentially signal suicidal ideation when used together.
For example, if a child types phrases such as ‘I don’t want to be here anymore’, ‘I don’t know what to do anymore’ and ‘I can’t keep going anymore’, it could indicate that they are struggling with their mental health.”
Linguistic Research Findings
Analysing Subtle Language Patterns to Help Schools Detect Early Signs
“This linguistic research revealed that words that don’t intuitively signpost safeguarding concerns can nevertheless point to expressions of suicidal ideation.
At Senso.cloud, we analyse both explicit and subtle language use to ensure we’re doing everything we can to help schools detect early signs of mental illness in students and potentially prevent suicides.”
– Dr Charlotte-Rose Kennedy, Safeguarding Language Specialist
Preventative Safeguarding Solutions
Spot the early warning signs and help to protect your students with our online safety solutions.
Contact us to learn more about our safeguarding tools and how we can help protect your students.