Suicide Among the Young: How to Try to Prevent It

To the Editor:

Re “After Three Suspected Suicides, a Shaken Cornell Reaches Out” (front page, March 17):

Suicide is a tragedy, made worse when occurring in youth. Many university campuses, not only Cornell, are beleaguered by this excruciatingly painful problem. After all, they have our youth and promise in their classes, seminars and dormitories.

The continuing neglect of the major cause of suicide among youth is shocking. The bulk of coverage in the media largely misses it. It is not only about stress, long winter nights, school challenges or failures, loneliness or social isolation. After all, most people who face these stressors do not kill themselves.

Thus, although stress might precipitate it, it is about mental illness, most commonly mood and substance abuse disorders. Until we as a country face the challenge of reaching our youth and providing high-quality mental health services, until we can reduce the stigma of seeking help for psychiatric conditions, we are crippled in our efforts to stem this scourge.

Our future is our youth. We are duty-bound to reach them and maximize the likelihood not only of their survival but also of their success.

Maria A. Oquendo
New York, March 17, 2010

The writer is a professor of clinical psychiatry and vice chairwoman for education in the department of psychiatry at Columbia University.

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Copycat effects after media reports on suicide: A population-based ecologic study.

Authors: Niederkrotenthaler, D., Till, B., Kapusta, N., Voracek, M., Dervic, K., & Sonneck, G. (2009). Social Science and Medicine, 69(7), 1085-1090.

The authors explored whether the risk of an increased number of suicides after a media report on suicide is associated with the social characteristics of the person whose suicide was reported. Celebrity status of the person whose suicide was reported was the only variable associated with an overall increase in the number of suicides after the media report of a suicide. That is, a suicide report involving a celebrity resulted in an increase in the total number of suicides in the 29 days following the report. However, the study also revealed three factors associated with an increase in the risk of “similar” suicides (that is, suicides of persons of the same sex, in the same age group, or who use the same method as the person whose suicide was reported in the media) over that same time period.

• The first factor is celebrity status.

• The second factor is whether the person who was reported to have died by suicide was in the same age group as the people exposed to the support (that is, people seem to be more likely to imitate a suicide if the person who died by suicide was in their age group).

• The third factor was definitiveness. Definitively labeling a death as a suicide in a media report (rather than reporting it as a suspected suicide) increased the risk for similar suicides.

The study also revealed that media reports of the suicide of an individual convicted of, or suspected of, crimes were associated with a decrease in similar suicides. None of the variables were found to be associated with a post-media report increase in “dissimilar” suicides (that is, suicides by people in another age group, of the other sex, or who chose a different method). Nor was the density of media suicide reports found to be associated with an increase in suicides.

The authors concluded that increases in suicides after a media report of a suicide is most pronounced for:

• (1) people with social characteristics similar to the person whose suicide was reported, because they are more likely to identify with the deceased than other people; and

• (2) persons seen as socially superior (celebrities) and thus as role models to be imitated. Reporting a suicide of persons of whom society disapproves (i.e. criminals) was associated with a lower risk of copycat suicides.

The study also found that reports of the suicide of middle-aged people were more likely to be followed by similar suicides than reports of suicides of people in other age groups. The authors speculated that this may be a consequence of the fact that the study utilized newspaper reports and that most newspaper readers are middle-aged. They suggested that additional research should be conducted on media that target children, adolescents, and the elderly. The authors also noted that only a limited fraction of suicide reports in the media were followed by an increase in suicides. The research team used data on suicides from the nonprofit information center Statistics Austria during the period July 1996–September 2006 and reports on suicide in the 13 most widely read Austrian newspapers (which reach 74.2% of that country’s population) during the same time period. Among the celebrity suicides reported during this period were those of rock stars Falco and Michael Hutchence and British weapons expert David Kelly.