Patterns of suicide mortality in England and Wales before and after the suicide of the actor Robin Williams.
Broadcast media
Celebrity
Media guidelines
Printed media
Suicide
Journal
Social psychiatry and psychiatric epidemiology
ISSN: 1433-9285
Titre abrégé: Soc Psychiatry Psychiatr Epidemiol
Pays: Germany
ID NLM: 8804358
Informations de publication
Date de publication:
Oct 2021
Oct 2021
Historique:
received:
06
10
2020
accepted:
10
03
2021
pubmed:
21
3
2021
medline:
14
9
2021
entrez:
20
3
2021
Statut:
ppublish
Résumé
There is international evidence supporting an association between sensational reporting of suicide and a subsequent increase in local suicide rates, particularly where reporting the death of a celebrity. We aimed to explore whether the observed increase in suicides in the United States, Canada and Australia in the 5 months following the 2014 suicide of the popular actor Robin Williams was also observed in England and Wales. We used interrupted time-series analysis and a seasonal autoregressive integrated moving averages (SARIMA) model to estimate the expected number of suicides during the 5 months following Williams' death using monthly suicide count data for England and Wales from the UK Office for National Statistics (ONS) 2013-2014. Compared with the observed 2051 suicide deaths in all age groups from August to December 2014, we estimated that we would have expected 1949 suicides over the same period, representing no statistically significant excess. This finding is an outlier among previous studies and contrasts with the approximately 10% increase in suicides found in similar analyses conducted in other high-income English-speaking countries with established media reporting guidelines.
Identifiants
pubmed: 33743027
doi: 10.1007/s00127-021-02059-z
pii: 10.1007/s00127-021-02059-z
pmc: PMC7980127
doi:
Types de publication
Journal Article
Langues
eng
Sous-ensembles de citation
IM
Pagination
1801-1808Subventions
Organisme : Medical Research Council
ID : G0802441
Pays : United Kingdom
Informations de copyright
© 2021. The Author(s).
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