People in the USA are questioning the role of suicide prevention videos after a 13-year-old girl who appeared in one for her school hung herself just weeks afterwards. In 2010, Floridian Johanna (JoJo) Lowe had played the lead role of the production, a girl who ends up committing suicide through a pill overdose. A few weeks later - and shortly after a breakup with her boyfriend, JoJo was found hanging in a closet in her bedroom.
Her mother, Eliette, and stepfather Stanley Piorkowski are so convinced that the two incidents are related that they have filed lawsuits against her teacher, Joseph Fife, and the Seminole County School Board. The suits allege that the school was negligent in that they did not get permission from them for her to appear in the video and her involvement in it affected her attitudes towards suicide, making it seem glamorous and sensational.
'Your respective conduct in authorizing the video's production…is outrageous and intolerable in a civilised society,' lawyers acting for the parents have written to the school board. They added that the video 'substantially contributed to [Johanna's] death' because of the ways it made her look at suicide. In defensive the school have argued that the they shouldn't be held accountable because JoJo was neither at school or under Fife's supervision when she took her own life. The case will continue in court next week.
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This article originally appeared on The Debrief.