The first known Internet suicide pact occurred in Japan, October 2000. A 46 year old male dentist and a 25 year old woman met each other through a suicide website chatroom and exchanged numerous e-mails in which they asked for the support of the other in committing suicide. They later met at the mans house and swallowed a lethal quantity of sleeping pills.

Japan’s ‘internet suicide’ community is a growing, and morbid underworld of chat rooms and websites with names like “Suicide Club” where thousands of young people meet and plan their deaths.

Some say sites can be a place to discuss suicidal thoughts and other subjects hard to discuss in real life and people can use the sites to find another to share in their death, so they don’t have to go through it alone. Others argue that some of the sites really encourage people to kill themselves, and the group creates a momentum which makes it hard to stop - members egg each other on until they become irrational.

Overall Japan has one of the highest suicide rates in the world. Internet suicide pacts represent 2% of all group suicide pacts, and around 0.01% of all suicides combined. However, they are on the increase with 34 deaths from such pacts occurred in 2003; at least 50 are estimated to have occurred in 2004; and 91 occurred in 2005, with these figures set to rise further.