The Netflix series 13 Reasons Why explores the suicide of a fictional teen, and the finale graphically shows the suicide over a 3-minute scene. The series has generated widespread interest (>600 000 news reports), including debate about its public health implications. For some viewers, the series glamorizes the victim and the suicide act in a way that promotes suicide, while other viewers hope the series raises suicide awareness. To advance the debate, we examined how internet searches for suicide changed, both in volume and content, after the series’ release. Methods Using Google Trends (http://google.com/trends) we obtained search trends including the term “suicide,” except those also mentioning “squad” (a popular film), emerging from the United States. Using the related search terms tool, we also monitored the top 25 terms and the next 5 most related terms to those, yielding 20 terms after ignoring duplicate, unrelated (eg, “suicide slide”), or unclear (eg, “suicide bridge”) terms. Suicide queries were divided by the total number of searches for each day and then scaled to range from 0 to 100, eg, 50 indicates 50% of the highest search proportion. Raw search counts were inferred using Comscore estimates (http://comscore.com). Our approach was quasiexperimental, comparing internet search volumes after the premiere of 13 Reasons Why with expected search volumes if the series had never been released (March 31, 2017, through April 18, 2017)....
Language: en
LA - en SN - 2168-6106 UR - http://dx.doi.org/10.1001/jamainternmed.2017.3333 ID - ref1 ER -