Summary
Previous work on suicide and the media has neglected theoretical issues. Some work has implied that only celebrity suicides can be expected to trigger additional suicides in the real world. The present study focuses on non celebrity suicides. Correcting coding errors in a previous work, it finds that the suicides of non celebrities are associated with increases in the national suicide rate. An index of publicized celebrity suicide stories was, however, more closely associated to increases in suicide than the publicized non celebrity stories. The model explains 90 percent of the variance in monthly suicide rates.
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The work on this paper was supported by grants from the National Institute of Mental Health, Numbers MH38209 and MH41510. Paper read at the annual meetings of the American Association of Suicidology, Washington, D.C., 1988.
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Stack, S. A reanalysis of the impact of non celebrity suicides. Soc Psychiatry Psychiatr Epidemiol 25, 269–273 (1990). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00788648
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00788648