Suicide is Contagious: A Network Perspective on Suicidal Behavior
Network theory has been the motivation of a substantial proportion of recent research on suicidal behavior. Like information or disease, suicidal behavior can be thought of as something which passes from entity to entity through connections between those entities. For example, an individual’s suicide might deeply affect friends connected to that individual, thereby increasing the risk that those friends attempt suicide as well.
Suicidal behavior may transfer through more subtle social relationships. A network framework may make sense in studying how media coverage of suicides might cause more suicides. In such a framework, “nodes” would correspond to individual media outlets and people in the community. “Edges” would be one-directional, connecting from media outlets to individuals, and they would correspond to a given media outlet’s coverage of a suicide reaching that individual. While not all citing explicitly the language of network theory, this basic idea drove a slew of studies from the 1980’s into the 2000’s. A literature review published in 2001 by Madelyn Gould of Columbia University perhaps best summarizes the general academic findings: when media outlets cover suicides, at least in certain ways and contexts, that coverage seems to cause imitative behaviors.
Gould reaches this conclusion by reviewing the findings of dozens of studies on the effects of both nonfictional suicide coverage in news media and fictional suicide stories in books, television, and movies. She concludes that coverage of a suicide seems at greatest risk of causing imitation in its audience when that coverage is substantial and heavily publicized, when the individual who committed suicide had greater celebrity status, and when the suicide is romanticized in some way. From a network perspective, these characteristics could define the “strength” of the edge between a media outlet and an individual. While this would most likely be more complex than identifying binary “weak” versus “strong” edges, the idea of relatively “stronger” edges, defined as those which exhibit the above characteristics to a greater extent, should transfer suicide risk more effectively relates naturally to network theory.
There exists research in almost every corner of the social and hard sciences which individuals pursue with the intent of saving lives. Some methods of preventing death are more costly than others. Gould closes her literature review with a series of guidelines for news and entertainment media which, according to the research of the time, are expected to minimize the risk of transmitting suicidal behaviors across media networks. That something as more or less “costless” as following a set of guidelines on how to frame suicide deaths in the media might “save” some substantial number of lives is a testament to the power of the types of observations one can make in applying even the most basic network theory.
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com.proxy.library.cornell.edu/doi/10.1111/j.1749-6632.2001.tb05807.x/pdf