Murder/Suicide Trend

onyxelle - Maybe I am living under a rock, but I live in central Florida, and I hadnt noticed. Years ago, a teacher in a media course once said that the way to start a crime wave in a town is for the newspapers to report all crimes on page three instead of page 37!

I'm in orlando...but I'm from tampa (boy do I miss it)

Anyway, maybe it's just localized....like in the orange/seminole county areas (which makes it even more scary). I hope it ends soon though. Its so that I hate to turn on the news anymore. (not that I ever really enjoyed it)

Hmmmmmm - reporting of suicides (or media examinations of suicide) tend to trigger more suicides.

I have often wondered - but I have no evidence except impressions - if reporting of murder/suicides has the same effect on them?

I know that they appear to come in clusters here - and that I dread it when one receives wide publicity - especially when it involves kids.

There was a great article in the New Yorker recently about Golden Gate Bridge suicides... evidently they have a longstanding policy of not reporting them as part of the attempt to reduce the number of suicides. There was at least an implication that reports = more suicides.

I think Phoenix may be essentially right. The fact we don't read about crimes does not mean they don't happen. So the question is whether the suicide and murder rates did really, statistically go up, or whether it is a hot media fashion.
It is not that easy to determine, and especially not with other kinds of crime: the laws change and so what yesterday was a misdemeanor or nothing at all, can today be classified as crime. So the statistical numbers can easily be going up, while the real number of criminals and criminal acts may not, or may even decline. People often use statistics and have no clue what exactly is behind those numbers.

Soz - it is well known that more reports = more suicides - from a number of unfortunate "natural experiments".

A suicide by one young person often triggers a cluster phenomenon amongst young people who knew them - of suicide, or attempts.

It is a huge problem when trying to educate re suicide.

The bunny is so right. It never seems to fail. Look at the rash of kids shooting up their schools a few years ago. After Columbine, it was one after the other after the other and you knew it was copycat. One person does it, get big pub and amazingly, some poor slob out here actually admires that kind of attention and wants some of it for themself. And it's heartbreaking because there's no solving it short of the media not reporting these stories. And you KNOW that will never happen. What's their motto? "If it don't bleed, it can't lead"?

Soz, that's definitely the trend we're seeing up here. . . my school's library has a large atrium, and (as you may have seen on the news- the coverage has been terribly frequent), we had three kids commit suicide from the balconies in a row over a few week period this year. . .

The library's been up for thirty years, never happened once. . . the more the reporting, the shorter the intervals got. . . two weeks, then three days. . . they roped off all high surfaces on the entire campus to stop it, and there's still mass hysteria over here. . .