Pitman, A;
Fink, DS;
Whitley, R;
(2021)
Patterns of suicide mortality in England and Wales before and after the suicide of the actor Robin Williams.
Social Psychiatry and Psychiatric Epidemiology
10.1007/s00127-021-02059-z.
(In press).
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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.
| Type: | Article |
|---|---|
| Title: | Patterns of suicide mortality in England and Wales before and after the suicide of the actor Robin Williams |
| Location: | Germany |
| Open access status: | An open access version is available from UCL Discovery |
| DOI: | 10.1007/s00127-021-02059-z |
| Publisher version: | http://doi.org/10.1007/s00127-021-02059-z |
| Language: | English |
| Additional information: | This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in the credit line; if the material is not included under the Creative Commons license, users will need to obtain permission from the license holder to reproduce the material. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ |
| Keywords: | Broadcast media, Celebrity, Media guidelines, Printed media, Suicide |
| UCL classification: | UCL UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Brain Sciences UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Brain Sciences > Division of Psychiatry |
| URI: | https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10125032 |
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