UC San Diego professor David Phillips has carefully studied the statistics of suicide in the United States for more than 20 years.
He found that in the two months after a suicide was reported on the front pages of newspapers, there were, on average, 58 more suicides than usual. Moreover, the increase occurred precisely in those states where the suicide case received wide publicity.
Phillips explains this by the fact that some unbalanced people, after reading about the suicide of a person, kill themselves in imitation of him. Of course, it can be assumed that at a given time in a given place the same factors act on many people, for example, magnetic storms, pushing them to suicide.
But this explanation is unacceptable: the increase in suicide is directly dependent on the breadth of coverage of suicide in the media. In neighboring regions, where conditions are the same, but newspapers do not publish reports of suicide, there is no sharp increase in their number.
This phenomenon has its own name - the Werther phenomenon. In 1774, Goethe's novel The Sorrows of Young Werther was published, the main character of which shot himself from unhappy love. The book not only made the writer famous, but also caused a wave of imitative suicides throughout Europe. Some countries have even banned the novel. In Russia, a similar impact, albeit on a smaller scale, was produced by Poor Liza, who prompted some young girls to throw themselves into a pond.
Another possible explanation for Werther's phenomenon is the bereavement hypothesis. On the front pages, only reports of suicides of well-known and respected people in society are published, so, perhaps, their death plunges readers into shock and deep despondency.
True, suicide from grief over a famous actor or athlete is much more difficult to assume than suicide for personal reasons. Most likely, the message about the act of a famous person is just an involuntary hint or sanction to those who are already in a difficult situation and cannot find a decent way out of it. Especially "effective" messages, which describe in detail the reasons and method of committing suicide.
In December 1925, Sergei Yesenin committed suicide. Before his death, he wrote poems with blood, which ended with the words: "In this life, dying is not new, but living, of course, is not new." A wave of suicides swept across the country. The poet's wife committed suicide right at his grave. Vladimir Mayakovsky even had to compose the poem "Sergei Yesenin" in order to debunk the romantic halo around his death. However, Mayakovsky also shot himself five years later.
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In August 1962, actress Marilyn Monroe died. Her tragic death shocked all of America and led to more than two hundred suicides committed within a month.
In April 1994, the leader of the rock group Nirvana, Kurt Cobain, shot himself. For the rest of the year, teenagers around the world committed suicide to his songs, leaving suicide notes with his name.
In 1999, a popular Canadian TV reporter hanged himself from his belt. The case received extensive local media coverage, which caused a 70% rise in suicide by hanging.
Reports of actual suicides are not necessarily the "clue". In 1981, a television feature film was broadcast in Germany, in which the misadventures of a young man were shown in detail, prompting him to commit suicide under the wheels of a train.
In two months after the screening of the film, the number of suicides under the wheels of trains has almost doubled, and among young men 15-19 years old - three times. A rerun of the film two years later led to a 20% increase in railroad suicides.
The media can cause a suicide epidemic, but they can also stop it. The 1980s saw a sharp spike in suicide under the wheels of subway trains in Vienna. The Austrian Suicide Association has carried out a large-scale campaign among journalists and achieved a change in the style of presenting such news in the media. When the messages ceased to be sensational and contain colorful details, the rate of "underground" suicide fell by 75%.
SUICIDE AND DISASTERS
While studying the aftermath of reports of suicides, Phillips discovered another interesting phenomenon.
When stories of suicide appear on the front pages of newspapers, the number of plane crashes and fatal accidents increases.
Moreover, the dependence is specific. Individual suicide stories lead to car crashes in which one person is killed, or accidents in private jets with one pilot on board. Suicide reports combined with homicide are causing an increase in fatal accidents.
The researcher considers all these disasters to be suicides disguised as an accident. He believes they are deliberately provoked by people who want to kill themselves, but preserve their reputation or give relatives the opportunity to get insurance.
This explanation seems straightforward. Most likely, the pilot or driver does not think or plan this step in advance. But, being under the impression of "deadly" information, he can make a ridiculous and unintentional mistake: at the moment of takeoff, lower the nose of the plane, miss the traffic light, confuse the gas pedal with the brake pedal.
The mechanism that triggers at the same time is called unconscious imitation, or mental infection. It occurs more often when the sample has a clear resemblance to the simulator. To test this, Philips looked at accident reports involving one car and one driver. The researcher compared the age of the suicide reported by the media with the age of the drivers who died in the crashes immediately after the report.
If the newspaper described the suicide of a young man, it was the young drivers who crashed into trees, poles and fences: if an elderly person appeared in the message, drivers of the same age died in accidents.