Citation

Lopez-Agudo LA. Psychiatry Res. 2020; 291: e113215.

Affiliation

Departamento de Economía Aplicada (Estadística y Econometría), Facultad de Ciencias Económicas y Empresariales, Universidad de Málaga, Plaza de El Ejido s/n, Málaga 29013, España. Electronic address: lopezagudo@uma.es.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2020, Elsevier Publishing)

DOI

10.1016/j.psychres.2020.113215

PMID

32559673

Abstract

Apart from disease, suicide has been the first cause of death in Spain since it overcame the victims of traffic accidents in the year 2007. Nevertheless, in spite of the high number of people affected by it every year, it is an almost silenced issue in this country. In the present research work we make use of Internet suicide-related search terms and official suicide rates for Spain to analyze whether these searches are related to actual suicides between 2004 and 2017. We find that the search terms "commit suicide", "commit suicide without pain" and "suicide" (as search term and as topic) are positively related to actual suicide rates. Thus, the Internet seems to be a consult tool for potential suicide victims in Spain which, joined to an increasing trend in the use of the Internet by the Spanish population, opens the gate for interventions through the results obtained in these Internet searches.

Copyright © 2020 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Language: en

Keywords

Big data; Google trends(Ⓡ); Google(Ⓡ); Suicide rates