@article{ref1,
title="The impact of media reporting of the suicide of a singer on suicide rates in Taiwan",
journal="Social psychiatry and psychiatric epidemiology",
year="2012",
author="Chen, Ying-Yeh and Liao, Shu-Fen and Teng, Po-Ren and Tsai, Chi-Wei and Fan, Hsiang-Fang and Lee, Wen-Chung and Cheng, Andrew Ta",
volume="47",
number="2",
pages="215-221",
abstract="PURPOSE: To examine if widespread media reporting of the suicide of a young female singer by charcoal burning increased suicide rates, and to examine whether the suicide induced a high risk of imitation suicide by this method among the young female group. METHODS: Poisson time series autoregression model was applied to examine the relative risk of overall and subgroup (age, gender and method) suicides during the 2-week period after the initiation of media reporting of the celebrity suicide. RESULTS: We found a significant increase (adjusted relative risk = 1.17, p = 0.04) in suicide deaths following media reporting of the celebrity suicide. The increase in suicides was particularly significant among female and young age groups. A marked increase in suicide by charcoal burning among females (adjusted relative risk = 1.44, p < 0.0001) was further observed. CONCLUSIONS: Detailed description of a specific suicide method following celebrity suicides may induce extensive modeling effect, attracting wider age/sex groups to model the method. Our finding provides further support for restraining media reporting of celebrity suicide in suicide prevention.<p /> <p>Language: en</p>",
language="en",
issn="0933-7954",
doi="10.1007/s00127-010-0331-y",
url="http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s00127-010-0331-y"
}