Alexandra Pitman1,2, David S Fink3,4, Rob Whitley5. 1. UCL Division of Psychiatry, Faculty of Brain Sciences, University College London, 6th Floor, Maple House, 149 Tottenham Court Road, London, W1T 7NF, UK. a.pitman@ucl.ac.uk. 2. Camden and Islington NHS Foundation Trust, London, UK. a.pitman@ucl.ac.uk. 3. Department of Epidemiology, Mailman School of Public Health, Columbia University, New York, NY, USA. 4. New York State Psychiatric Institute, New York, NY, USA. 5. Department of Psychiatry, Douglas Mental Health University Institute, McGill University, Montreal, QC, Canada.
Abstract
PURPOSE: 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. METHOD: 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. RESULTS: 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. CONCLUSIONS: 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.
PURPOSE: 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. METHOD: 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. RESULTS: 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. CONCLUSIONS: 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.
Authors: Thomas Niederkrotenthaler; King-wa Fu; Paul S F Yip; Daniel Y T Fong; Steven Stack; Qijin Cheng; Jane Pirkis Journal: J Epidemiol Community Health Date: 2012-04-21 Impact factor: 3.710
Authors: Thomas Niederkrotenthaler; Marlies Braun; Jane Pirkis; Benedikt Till; Steven Stack; Mark Sinyor; Ulrich S Tran; Martin Voracek; Qijin Cheng; Florian Arendt; Sebastian Scherr; Paul S F Yip; Matthew J Spittal Journal: BMJ Date: 2020-03-18