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A copycat suicide is defined as an emulation of another suicide that the person attempting suicide knows about either from local knowledge or due to accounts or depictions of the original suicide on television and in other media. The publicized suicide serves as a trigger, in the absence of protective factors, for the next suicide by a susceptible or suggestible person. This is referred to as suicide contagion.
A spike in emulation suicides after a widely publicized suicide is known as the Werther effect, after rumours of such a spike following the publication of Goethe's novel The Sorrows of Young Werther.
Suicides occasionally spread through a school system, through a community, or in terms of a celebrity suicide wave, nationally. This is called a suicide cluster. Point clusters are clusters of suicides in both time and space, and have been linked to direct social learning from nearby individuals. Mass clusters are clusters of suicides in time but not space, and have been linked to the broadcasting of information concerning celebrity suicides via the mass media.
This resulted in the book being banned in several places. Hence the term "Werther effect" is used in the technical literature to designate copycat suicides. The term was coined by researcher David Phillips in 1974.
Reports in 1985 and 1989 by Phillips and his colleagues found that suicides and other accidents seem to rise after a well-publicized suicide.
Due to the effects of differential identification, the people who attempt to copy a suicidal act tend to have the same age and gender as the triggering suicide.
According to a study from four South Korean researchers, the rate of suicide significantly increased following celebrity suicides between 2005 and 2008. Additionally, substantial upsurges were discovered in the subgroups that corresponded to each celebrity, particularly in the group when all variables (sex, age, and technique) were comparable.
The Werther effect not only predicts an increase in suicide, but the majority of the suicides will take place in the same or a similar way as the one publicized. The more similar the person in the publicized suicide is to the people exposed to the information about it, the more likely the age group or demographic is to die by suicide. The increase generally happens only in areas where the suicide story was highly publicized. Upon learning of someone else's suicide, some people decide that action may be appropriate for them as well, especially if the publicized suicide was of someone in a situation similar to their own.
Publishing the means of suicides, romanticized and sensationalized reporting—particularly about celebrities, suggestions that there is an epidemic, glorifying the deceased and simplifying the reasons all lead to increases in the suicide rate. People may see suicide as a glamorous ending, with the deceased getting attention, sympathy, and concern that they never got in life. A second possible factor is that vulnerable youth may feel, "If they couldn't cut it, neither can I". An increased rate of suicides has been shown to occur up to ten days after a television report. Studies in Japan and Germany have replicated findings of an imitative effect. Etzersdorfer et al. in an Austrian study showed a strong correlation between the number of papers distributed in various areas and the number of subsequent firearm suicides in each area after a related media report. Higher rates of copycat suicides have been found in those with similarities in race, age, and gender to the deceased in the original report. However, a study from South Korea found that preventative measures restricting how the news reports on suicide do not have much effect, possibly suggesting some other causal factor is at play for changing suicide rates.
Stack analyzed the results from 42 studies and found that those measuring the effect of a celebrity suicide story were 14.3 times more likely to find a copycat effect than studies that did not. Studies based on a real as opposed to a fictional story were 4.03 times more likely to uncover a copycat effect and research based on televised stories was 82% less likely to report a copycat effect than research based on newspapers. Other scholars have been less certain about whether copycat suicides truly happen or are selectively hyped. For instance, fears of a suicide wave following the suicide of Kurt Cobain never materialized in an actual increase in suicides. Coverage of Cobain's suicide in the local Seattle area focused largely on treatment for mental health issues, suicide prevention and the suffering Cobain's death caused to his family. Perhaps as a result, the local suicide rate actually declined in the following months.
Furthermore, there is evidence for an indirect Werther effect, i.e. the perception that suicidal media content influences others which, in turn, can concurrently or additionally influence one person's own future thoughts and behaviors. Similarly, the researcher Gerard Sullivan has critiqued research on copycat suicides, suggesting that data analyses have been selective and misleading and that the evidence for copycat suicides is much less consistent than suggested by some researchers.Sullivan, G. (2007). Should Suicide Be Reported in the Media? A Critique of Research. Remember me: Constructing immortality—Beliefs on immortality, life and death (pp. 149–58). New York: Routledge/Taylor & Francis Group. Additionally, a review by Cheng and colleagues finds that most research on the relationship of media coverage to suicidality lacks solid theoretical grounding, making interpreting the research very difficult. Sonia Livingstone argues that media effects research as a whole has many flaws, and needs serious evaluation as a field before additional interpretations can be drawn from such research.
Studies show a high incidence of psychiatric disorders in suicide cases at the time of their death with the total figure ranging from 87.3% to 98%, with and substance abuse being the two most common.
Canada's public broadcaster, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, abides by standards that "avoid describing the act in detail or illustrating the method" of suicides.
Headline is Ireland's media monitoring programme for suicide and mental health issues, set up by Shine (national mental health organisation) and the Health Service Executives National Office for Suicide Prevention as part of the program Reach Out: National Strategy for action on Suicide Prevention. Headline Headline works with media professionals and students to find ways to collaborate to ensure that suicide, mental health and mental illness are responsibly covered in the media and provides information on reporting on mental health and suicidal behavior, literature and daily analysis of news stories. Headline also serves as a vehicle for the public to become involved in helping to monitor the Irish media on issues relating to mental health and suicide.
Studies suggest that the risk of suicide fell significantly when media outlets began following recommendations for suicide reporting in the late 20th century.
If a novel or news can induce self-harm, then it must be assumed that those narratives might have a positive effect on prevention. There is more research into the damage done by "irresponsible media reports" than into the protective effects of positive stories, but when newspapers refuse to publicize suicide events or change the way that they provide information about suicide events, the risk of copycat suicides declines.
Another famous case is the self-immolation of Mohamed Bouazizi, a Tunisian street vendor who set himself on fire on December 17, 2010, an act that was a catalyst for the Tunisian Revolution and sparked the Arab Spring, including several men who emulated Bouazizi's act.
A 2017 study published in JAMA Internal Medicine found the online series 13 Reasons Why which chronicled a fictional teen's suicide was associated with an increase in suicide related Internet searches, including a 26% increase in searches for "how to commit suicide", an 18% increase for "commit suicide" and 9% increase for "how to kill yourself". On May 29, 2019, research published in JAMA Psychiatry outlined an association of increased suicides in 10- to 19-year-olds in the United States in the three months following the release of 13 Reasons Why, consistent with a media contagion of suicide in the show. However, some media scholar studies implied that viewing 13 Reasons Why was not associated with suicidal ideation but actually with reduced depressive symptoms.
The cause-and-effect relationship between media and suicide is not simple to prove. Prof. Sonia Livingstone emphasized the claim of causality in media-effect cannot be considered conclusive because of different methodological approaches and disciplinary perspective. Even if it is accepted that media can have an effect on suicidal ideation, it is not a sufficient condition to drive people to commit suicide; the effects that media can have on suicidal behaviour are certainly less important than individual psychological and social risk factors.
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