Episode 3: Can Suicide Spread? The Evidence on Media and Contagion

So in the teaser, I kind of gave this away that I do think the suicide contagion effect is actually a causal effect, i.e., reporting suicides in a salacious manner or talking about the methods or talking about it without doing some of the mitigating things that we now teach can actually lead to susceptible people dying by suicide.

Um, and, and I believe that this relationship is causal.

Now, obviously, there's no randomized control trial that we're ever gonna see that says that.

Um, but we do have lots of reasons to believe this evidence.

If I were pegging this evidence, to me, this is like a I'm ninety-five percent sure that celebrity news coverage, um, raises population suicides, um, when suicides occur.

Uh, I have no doubt, a hundred percent certain that imitation happens in individuals.

When an individual sees, um, a suicide, um, they can be inspired by that suicide and die and specifically talk about it in their suicide note.

Um, so it's very unambiguous.

Certainly, imitation happens in individuals.

I do believe with a very high degree of confidence that suicide contagion happens in populations when, um, news reports of celebrity or famous people dying occur.

Um, I am far less certain about fictional, um, suicides, um, raising suicides in the population.

Uh, so whether it's, uh, a show like Thirteen Reasons Why or a book like we're gonna talk about that coined the original Werther effect term, um, there is some reason to think that fictional suicides can be sort of like Santa Claus.

It doesn't inspire a bunch of people, um, to try and go down chimneys, um, nor does, um, the story of Superman make people try to jump off of buildings and fly.

So, um, you know, it could be that fictional suicides, um, have a much smaller effect.

But I, I still believe that there is an effect in fictional suicides, especially when the fiction is powerful and very careless with respect to how it handles suicide.

Suicide contagion is actually one of the oldest observations in suicidology.

It's one of the few areas where we get these natural experiments that occur from time to time.

A famous person will die, and the statistics on suicide come out later.

So we can set up these pre ready-to-go tests for, well, we know when this death occurred.

Let's look at the deaths by suicide that happened after this point.

Um, and we can do what are called time series analyses.

And because we're pre-registering our time series analysis, um, it allows us to be, you know, pretty certain that this is an effect.

This isn't us just randomly going back and p-hacking a difference.

Um, but we're gonna talk today about where the idea of suicide contagion came from, um, and what the evidence shows.

Um, I'm gonna talk about some specific analyses that I've done, uh, that have me very convinced.