Suicide Notes Database

The development of the Suicide Notes database marked the initial phase of suicide research for the Pestian Lab. It was our desire to build a "corpus" or collection of notes, and annotate the words, phrases and sentences in them according to the emotions they convey. The database contains over 1,300 notes, collected between 1950 and 2011 by Dr. Edwin Shneidman and Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center, written by people before they died from suicide.

After the notes were compiled, transcribed and anonymized, annotators were recruited to identify the emotions in these notes. "Vested volunteers" -- specifically those with an emotional connection to the subject of suicide -- were enlisted from online suicide support communities to identify emotions such as anger, blame, fear, guilt, hopelessness, etc. Up to three annotators were assigned to a single note, which allowed for interannotator agreement to be evaluated.

A total of 1,278 notes were annotated at least once and 1,008 were evaluated three times. Interannotator agreement of the emotions assigned to sentences indicated good agreement.