ATLANTA– A landmark study of newspaper coverage of suicides provides empirical support for media guidelines aimed at minimizing the likelihood of suicide clusters among college students.
“Given the prevalence of suicide on college campuses, and the associated risk of suicide contagion and clustering, it’s imperative that colleges develop effective and comprehensive postvention programs,” Madelyn S. Gould, Ph.D., said at the annual conference of the American Association of Suicidology.
Dr. Madelyn S. Gould
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, suicide is the No. 2 cause of death among college students, with roughly 1,100 completed suicides occurring annually, noted Dr. Gould, professor of epidemiology in psychiatry at Columbia University, New York, and the New York State Psychiatric Institute.
Suicide contagion is the process by which direct or indirect knowledge of one suicide facilitates subsequent suicide. Dr. Gould was the lead investigator in a national study that examined the role of newspaper coverage of suicide as a contributor to suicide clusters among 13- to 20-year-olds. The retrospective, population-based, case-control study included 48 communities in which suicide clusters occurred during 1988-1996 – before the arrival of social media. The control group consisted of 95 matched communities in which a youth suicide was not followed by a suicide cluster.
The key finding: The more sensational the newspaper coverage of suicides as evidenced by a greater number of stories, front page placement, and more details about the suicidal individual and act, the greater the likelihood of subsequent suicide clusters (Lancet Psychiatry 2014;1:34-43).
Dr. Gould highlighted what she considers a seminal study led by Dr. Thomas Niederkrotenthaler of the Medical University of Vienna. The investigators analyzed the content of nearly 500 suicide-related Austrian print media articles and demonstrated that while sensational and/or repetitive coverage of suicides was associated with a subsequent increase in suicide, stories about mastery-of-crisis – that is, articles about individuals with suicidal ideation who adopted coping strategies other than suicidal behavior when faced with adverse circumstances – were associated with a decreased suicide rate (Br. J. Psychiatry 2010;197:234-43). Dr. Niederkrotenthaler calls it “the Papageno effect,” after a lovesick character in Mozart’s opera “The Magic Flute” whose planned suicide is averted by three child spirits who remind him of alternatives to death.
Dr. Gould noted that emotions also can be spread through the social media, as was made evident by the Facebook’s News Feed Experiment. In this massive study, investigators in Facebook’s research department manipulated the emotional content of the Facebook News Feed for 689,003 Facebook members. When exposure to friends’ positive emotional content in their news feed was reduced, subjects produced fewer positive and more negative posts. When exposure to negative content in the news feed was reduced, the result was more positive and fewer negative posts (Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA 2014;11:8788-90).
The Higher Education Mental Health Alliance has disseminated a comprehensive suicide postvention guide for colleges. It includes specific recommendations aimed at limiting suicide contagion on campuses. The guide includes recommended media guidelines in the wake of suicide, emphasizes the importance of addressing common and counterproductive myths about suicide, and provides tips on how to shape students’ desire to “do something” in the aftermath of a student suicide while at the same time balancing that constructive urge against the needs of mourners.
Guidance regarding how to encourage responsible social networking in the aftermath of a suicide is available from the Suicide Prevention Research Center, Dr. Gould continued.
Up to half of college students with suicidal ideation choose not to share that information with anyone.
“There are a lot of vulnerable students on campuses. Consider implementing the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention’s anonymous online Interactive Screening Program,” she said.
Dr. Gould’s suicide cluster study was funded by the National Institute of Mental Health and the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention. She reported receiving royalties as coauthor of the Columbia-Suicide Severity Rating Scale.