News Stories on Suicide Can Cause Others to Try It, Sociologist Claims

The widely publicized joint suicide of four Bergenfield, N.J., youths in March seems to have had a strong impact on other teen-agers--there were at least 35 similar cases in the next few weeks, according to one researcher. This, in turn, has given increased prominence to the cluster theory--where suicides are related in some fashion--and the media’s role in influencing such a situation.

“A news story about a suicide functions like the trigger on a gun,” says David Phillips, a professor of sociology at the University of California, San Diego. Just as a gun needs a trigger, he explains, so does the potential suicide receive motivation from a news story.

“Probably what happens is there’s a lot of unhappy people out there, and they’re not sure how to respond to their unhappiness. When they see one method of responding--for example, suicide--they are more likely to copy that. It’s just like any other form of advertising.”

Fictional Depictions

According to Phillips, the evidence is fairly conclusive that prominent news stories can cause a rise in suicides. When it comes to fictional depictions of suicide on TV movies, however, any influence is much less certain.

Although suicide clusters have been around at least since Goethe’s 1774 novel “The Sorrows of Young Werther” caused young adults throughout Europe to kill themselves, only in the past few years has the phenomenon received widespread attention--and it’s still unclear how pervasive it is.

Loren Coleman, a researcher at the University of Southern Maine and editor of a newsletter on youth-suicide prevention, provides an extended look at the subject in Suicide Clusters (Faber & Faber, $11.95).

A cluster, he explains, occurs when “through word of mouth, you know someone in your school, community or section of state who is similar to you in age, race, economic status or some similar situation (and) who has committed suicide. You strongly identify with the victim. That puts you in the high-risk group. You feel you have no other choice but to do the same thing.”

Cluster Theory

Although Coleman and other observers believe that a prominent cluster can in itself help provoke other, more distant suicides, it is on the local level that the effect is seen as especially significant. Between June 1986 and the March 11 tragedy, there were four “accident-suicides” among teen-agers in Bergenfield. One drowned in a pond, two were killed by trains, and the fourth fell from a cliff.

“The people who are very vulnerable, who may have tried to get assistance through some other cry for help, tend to get a hometown model of a completed suicide,” says Coleman. “They see it as an option that previously wasn’t there.”

The March 11 suicides were extensively covered by the press--sometimes, Coleman says, with a heavy hand. “Some of the stuff going on with the New York TV stations was atrocious--going into people’s homes and doing counseling around the table. When you have paraprofessionals doing group therapy (on TV), all it does is stir up group emotions that don’t have an outlet.”

In the four weeks after Bergenfield, Coleman says, “there were 35 imitations--and 14 of them were in pacts of two people each. That’s extremely high. Pacts just don’t occur that often.”

Outside Influences

Although it is still unclear how many of these teens would have killed themselves without any outside influence, Coleman and Phillips anticipate there will be a year-to-year rise in that age group when the final statistics are collected for that period.

This effect, called “contagion,” has been explored in several full-scale studies. Phillips and another researcher looked at 12,585 teen suicides and 38 suicide news stories from 1973 to 1979. Their conclusion was that youth suicides increased significantly immediately after a publicized suicide, especially among girls.

A second study, this time of the effect of suicide-related television movies on New York-area teens, found that the suicide rate was significantly higher than normal immediately after the broadcast.

“The more publicity given to the story, the greater the increase in suicides just afterwards,” says Phillips in summarizing his 14 years of research. “There is no increase just before the story, only just after.

“Another piece of evidence is that the drivers in single-car crashes that occur just after the story are unusually similar to the person described in the suicide story. If the suicide story is about an old guy, for instance, the driver is abnormally old. . . . There’s a package of results that it’s very difficult to find an alternative explanation for.”

Effects on Elderly

Nor is the contagion theory restricted to the young. In a six-week period in February and March, at least eight elderly Florida couples were involved in apparent murder-suicides. One Deerfield Beach, Fla., man, who killed his wife but survived his suicide attempt, told authorities he had planned the act after watching a made-for-TV movie about Roswell Gilbert, a 77-year-old Florida man convicted for the murder of his ailing wife.

The contagion approach isn’t universally accepted. Yet Mark Rosenberg, a psychiatric epidemiologist at the federal Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta, says that even while he’s not totally convinced, the theory “raises the possibility that there is a very important effect that the media has on youth suicide. . . . But we still don’t know what proportion of youth suicides involve contagion.”

In a paper presented recently at the American Assn. of Suicidology’s convention in San Francisco, American University psychology professor Alan Berman challenged some earlier conclusions. He spent about a year looking at the influence of television movies. In contrast to the earlier study, however, he covered a broader area than just New York. He used statistics from 19 medical examiner’s offices, representing one-fifth of the country’s population.

Impact of Films

“Basically, we found there was not an increase in total suicides and no increase in youth suicides,” Berman says. However, with at least one of the films, which involved suicide by carbon-monoxide poisoning, “there was a shift in the proportion of youth who suicided by that method.”

An examination of suicides in Los Angeles County immediately after comedian Freddie Prinze shot himself in 1977 produced a similar result: No increase in total youth suicides but an increase in gunshot wounds.

As a result, “if nothing else, we ought to be careful about the visual stimuli”--photographs of the means and methods, or descriptions of the acts in movies. Berman has an example in mind: the January suicide of R. Budd Dwyer, the Pennsylvania state treasurer who shot himself at a press conference. Several newspapers and at least one TV station ran graphic photos or film; many did not.

Berman’s view, based on his own and others’ research, is that “the more we present behavior as normative, as something that’s acceptable and part of our culture, the more we present it as something to be modeled. . . . We don’t create new suicides among people who otherwise weren’t suicidal, but had they not had a model, they may have never acted upon that urge.”

‘Balancing Act’

If there is a direct influence, the inevitable result would seem to lead to a suppression of all news of suicide. However, neither Coleman, Berman nor Phillips takes that view.

“This matter is now where child-abuse and wife-beating stories were about 10 years ago,” says Coleman. “There is a balancing act. On the one hand, people have to know about the problem, and they have to know that people are applying themselves to it. But sensationalized accounts tend to work against suicide prevention.”

In the name of public health, Phillips agrees that “we should not endanger the First Amendment. But there are other solutions. Research suggests it’s only the front-page stories that have any detectable effect. One possibility is to put these stories on an inside page.”

In addition, since a news story can seem like an advertisement for suicide, “the more one can blur that factor, the less the effect is likely to be. You could say the suicide could have spoken to a counselor, joined a peer group, talked to a rabbi or minister, or could have called the following hot-line number. By expanding the story to cover alternatives, one might reduce the impact.”

Finally, news stories typically do not describe the painful and perhaps gruesome consequences of suicide--they tend, in Phillips’ analysis, to treat the deaths neutrally or sympathetically. Less imitation would occur with negative treatments, he says, than with positive ones.

Negative Treatment

“When a person shoots himself in the head, he may be dreadfully disfigured. Or if you take poison, you can lose control of your bowels and soil yourself. If a teen-age girl reads that, she is, in my view, much less likely to imitate.”

After a teen suicide cluster develops, Coleman argues, “the crisis mentality that often occurs tends to get people scared, and then they don’t communicate. . . . Everyone starts panicking. Instead, there needs to be a community effort to increase the communication between the teens and those people who can help them--whether it’s guidance counselors, teachers, parents or other teens.”

Experts also caution against overemphasizing suicide in general. Although the rate is much greater in the past decade than it was previously, in the past few years the numbers have stabilized.

“Attention is terribly important,” says Berman. “However, too much attention can make it seem like it’s happening on every street corner. You walk a thin line.

“If we don’t study it and understand it and do something about it, then you have a social problem on a terrible level that can get worse--and shouldn’t be as bad as it is.”