

Thursday, April 9, 2009

Censoring Murder-Suicide: What If Everything Is Contagious?

Ecological studies suggest that highly publicized suicides cause more suicides. But what other behaviors are media-contagious - and why are we so slow to censor (or even study) them?

Idea Contagion

For good or ill, behaviors among humans pass not only by genes, but by language. A judgmental way to put this is that behaviors and ideas are "contagious." Pathological homesickness, apotemnophilia,[4] multiple personality disorder, and even Ursuline convents in seventeenth-century France[6] have been posited to arise from contagion.

In particular, suicide is widely accepted as a contagious behavior. The posited contagion even has a name - the "Werther effect." Belief in the media contagion of suicide is so strong and pervasive that "media guidelines" - a form of voluntary censorship - are widely observed in reporting on suicide.

There is evidence that many behaviors other than suicide are similarly "contagious," however. Violence against others, in particular, is well-studied in its relation to media contagion. The harm of violence, especially homicidal violence like murder and murder-suicide, is much greater than that of suicide. And the evidence in favor of "violence contagion" is stronger than that of suicide contagion. Why, then, are reports of suicide voluntarily censored, while reports of violence are not?

Suicide Contagion: The Evidence

The evidence for suicide contagion through the media is almost entirely ecological. The studies that provide the basis for the phenomenon of suicide contagion are somewhat questionable.[7] Many suffer from lack of control for important variables; those that are controlled suffer from problems with the control groups or small sample size. Some ecological studies have indicated that the suicide contagion phenomenon is real;[2] others have contradicted those findings. Even among studies that find a correlation between suicide rate and media reports of suicides, the correlation is often much weaker than the correlation of the suicide rate with other factors, such as the unemployment rate.[9]

Of course, there is a more abstract critique of ecological-level data in general. A criticism[1] of David Phillips' ecological data on suicide contagion and fatal aircraft incidents goes as follows:
Phillips asserts that the statistically significant increase in aircraft fatalities can be explained due to suicide, as well as a "consciously or unconsciously" induced motive on the part of the pilot to also murder some person or persons. What Phillips does, in effect, is impute suicidal motives to some deceased persons on the basis of the statistically significant increases in accidents. Such a jump is conceptually unwise because it is based on a tautology: the statistical increase is the basis for defining some cases as suicide, but these cases are also used to explain the increase. [Citations removed.]
At any rate, a major problem with suicide contagion research is a lack of empirical evidence at an individual level. The one case-controlled study that I am aware of[7] fails to demonstrate any link between hearing media reports of suicide and making a suicide attempt - and, in fact, demonstrates that hearing a media report of suicide has a significant protective effect against suicide attempts.


Violence Contagion?

The evidence for violence contagion is much stronger than that for suicide contagion. But whereas suicide censorship is widely accepted, censorship of other-directed violence in media stories is rare.

Violence contagion is demonstrated by the same type of ecological study as suicide contagion.[8] In addition, unlike the suicide case, there is a body of laboratory evidence suggesting that exposure to violent stimuli increases aggressive behavior. However, despite both sources of evidence, the theory that media reports of violence "cause" real-life violence is not at all universally accepted.[5] And the idea that the media should voluntarily self-censor with regard to reports of violence is much less widely accepted than self-censorship of reports of suicide, despite greater evidence for a causal link in the former case.

Contagion and Moral Responsibility

I believe that the insistence that suicide is media-contagious, but violence is not, is not rational, but is a consequence of the differential attributions of moral responsibility in cases of suicide versus other-directed violence. Suicide is seen as an irrational act; the actor, as the story goes, is not in control of himself, certainly not sane, and is therefore vulnerable to external effects.

On the other hand, the idea that violent acts like homicides are attributable to media suggestion is generally seen as a pathetic excuse. Perpetrators of violence are perceived as much more morally responsible for their acts than suicides; despite evidence to the contrary, idea contagion is psychologically ruled out as a cause of violence, but not of suicides (though there are exceptions to this line of thinking[3]).

Is political corruption contagious? Adultery? Prostitution? Drug abuse? Such questions are rarely even studied. Obesity certainly appears to be contagious. If so, should we censor reports of these topics to avoid a contagion effect? To do so would seem ludicrous and counter-productive, not to mention contrary to our political ideals. But the censorship of suicide goes unchallenged.

Moral Responsibility and Willingness to Censor




Think of the children.

On a largely unrelated note, could this be the stupidest news story about suicide of all time?

Works Cited

1. Altheide, David. "Airplane Accidents, Murder, and the Mass Media: Comment on Phillips." Social Forces 2:593-596 (Special Issue, 1981).

2. Bollen, Kenneth, and David Phillips. "Imitative Suicides: A National Study of the Effects of Television News Stories." American Sociological Review 47:802-09 (1982).

3. Coalition of Law Abiding Sporting Shooters. "Ideas Kill: Science Shines a Light on Port Arthur Deaths." Retrieved from on 04/06/2009.

4. Elliot, Carl. "A new way to be mad." The Atlantic, December 2000.

5. Gunter, Barrie. "Media Violence: Is There a Case for Causality?" American Behavioral Scientist 51:1061 (2008).

6. Jones, Marshall, and Elizabeth Rapley. "Behavioral Contagion and the Rise of Convent Education in France." Journal of Interdisciplinary History 31.4:489-521 (2001).

7. Mercy, James, Marcie-jo Kresnow, Patrick W. O’Carroll, Roberta K. Lee, Kenneth E. Powell, Lloyd B. Potter, Alan C. Swann, Ralph F. Frankowski, and Timothy L. Bayer. "Is Suicide Contagious? A Study of the Relation between Exposure to the Suicidal Behavior of Others and Nearly Lethal Suicide Attempts." (American Journal of Epidemiology 154:2 (2001).

8. Phillips, David. "The Impact of Mass Media Violence on U.S. Homicides." American Sociological Review 48:4:560-568 (1983).

9. Stack, Steven. "Divorce, Suicide, and the Mass Media: An Analysis of Differential Identification, 1948-1980." Journal of Marriage and the Family 2:553-560 (1990).


  1. Do any studies on suicide contagion make a distinction between the effects of media reports compared with the effects of dramatic narratives? It seems significant that the actual (i.e., historical) "Wherther Effect" refers to the apparent increase in suicide triggered by a popular novel about unrequited love featuring an arguably sympathetic victim-protagonist (see Pat Highsmith's novel, "This Sweet Sickness" for a more jaundiced take on the suicidal would-be lover). It is easy to imagine how a reader in similar straights might be edged toward self-destruction by such a tragic narrative. It is equally easy for me to imagine the same reader being unmoved by a detailed newspaper account of a suicide.

    The first time I ever heard of suicide contagion was back in the 80s, when an after school special devoted to teen suicide was supposedly followed by a spate of real life incidents. In that instance as well, the imputed catalyst was a fictional narrative, ironically intended to "raise awareness." If the effect exists, the mechanism may prove more complex than simple mimicry. It may have a great deal to do with the way we tell and respond to stories. Same with violence.

    Incidentally, I always thought that "cruise ship illness" would eventually be explained as social contagion, but no one seems to have pursued this.
  2. Erratum: In the above comment, "straights" should be "straits."
  3. There is apparently some evidence for a narrative (or differential identification) component to suicide contagion - the article in #9 deals with an instance of this. Many of the censorship guidelines deal with portraying the narrative in the "correct," safe way - e.g. it was caused by mental illness, not revealing details of method, etc.

    Method seems particularly transmissible, There's a study tracing an increase in overdose (especially Tylenol overdose) to a popular television program in the UK, and there's evidence for media transmission of the charcoal burning method in Hong Kong and the hydrogen sulfide gas method in Japan.
  4. I also think there's evidence of differential identification in terms of race - e.g., white people commit suicide more in the wake of a highly-publicized suicide by a white person, etc. I'll try to find the study later.
  5. If you have access, you might want to glance at this:

    I can only read the abstract, but I am curious to know what the film/TV subjects were and which of the three obtained a potential Werther effect. The 80s After School Special that I had in mind was called, "A Desperate Exit" and starred Malcolm-Jamal Warner.
  6. "could this be the stupidest news story about suicide of all time?"

    I think perhaps so. Stupid sure is contagious.
  7. Chip, I sent you a PDF of the article you were interested in.

    The films were:

    1. “A Reason to Live,” an NBC movie broadcast on Jan. 7, 1985, depicting a teenage boy’s efforts to stop his father’s threatened suicide by gun.

    2. “Surviving,” an ABC movie broadcast on Feb. 10, 1985, dealing with the suicides of a teenage boy and girl by carbon monoxide poisoning.

    3. “A Desperate Exit,” broadcast by ABC as an after-school special on Sept. 17, 1986, dealing with the effects of a teenage boy’s suicide. No description or depiction of his method was given.

    The carbon monoxide one showed a statistically significant rise in carbon monoxide suicides among youth 24 and younger, though not a rise in total suicides or youth suicides proportional to other groups. The gun one showed a 15% rise in suicides by gunshot over a 4-week period, but it wasn't statistically significant.

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  3. Fear of death is not love of life.

  4. @Ian_HT completely my own fault of course







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  12. @bswud thanks!

  13. @realmattforney you're too real the rest of the time






  19. how are those belmont "marriages" going lol 

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