Police suspect Facebook posting led to Indian girl's suicide

Sep 21, 2011, 10:23 GMT

New Delhi - Indian police suspect a 21-year-old business student committed suicide after her boyfriend announced their break-up on social networking site Facebook, reports said Wednesday.

Malini Murmu, a student of the Indian Institute of Management in Bangalore, was found hanging in her room Monday.

Preliminary investigations suggested Murmu committed suicide after reading her boyfriend's posting on Facebook saying he had dumped her, the Indian Express newspaper reported citing police.

Police found messages on her laptop and a whiteboard in her room that indicated she was deeply upset by the split.

'From preliminary investigations it seems like a suicide connected to a post on a social networking site indicating a break-up,' deputy commissioner of police PS Harsha was quoted as saying.

Clinical psychologists said social networking sites were having an adverse impact on the psyche of young people.

'Since the last one to two years patients have come to me, disturbed about what people had written about them online,' Delhi-based psychiatrist Deepak Gupta was quoted as saying by the Times of India newspaper.

'The perception about one's image on social networking forms a major part about how youngsters perceive themselves nowadays,' Gupta said.