On the 25 November 2020, Alice Hendy lost her brother Josh to suicide.
Alice was able to check Josh's internet history and was horrified to discover he had been researching methods of suicide. This led Alice to apply her IT and cyber security skills to find a way to protect those who might consider searching for similar content online.
Within weeks, Alice was speaking with the likes of Google and Samaritans and created R;pple Suicide Prevention.
On World Suicide Prevention Day (Friday 10 September), R;pple launched its web browser extension for Google and Microsoft Edge.
Currently, when anyone types keywords into their web browser, relating to finding methods of suicide or intent to take their own life, Google's top search results display the Samaritan's phone number and more recently Shout, the text-based support site. The entries are small and displayed with small, black, non-bold font.
R;pple goes beyond this by opening a page, in front of the searched for content, providing messages of hope and a choice of different support resources and in colour.
You can now download the R;pple extension onto your browser and encourage those you live and work with to do the same - it could be the one thing you do this week that saves a life.
You can find a step-by-step guide on how to download R;pple here: https://www.ripplesuicideprevention.com/install
Users simply need to add the extension on their chosen browser.