ArticleCanadian journal of psychiatry. Revue canadienne de psychiatrie2019
Suicide Mortality in Canada after the Death of Robin Williams, in the Context of High-Fidelity to Suicide Reporting Guidelines in the Canadian Media.
Article in Canadian journal of psychiatry. Revue canadienne de psychiatrie, 2019. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 16 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
16 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it.
- Quantitative Methods to Detect Suicide and Self-Harm Clusters: A Systematic Review.International journal of environmental research and public health · 2022Pooled it
- Psychiatrists' Perceptions of the Role of Journalists in Suicide Reporting and Prejudices about Mental Illnesses in Portugal.Journal of community health · 2024Article
- Copycat in Suicide: A Systematic Review of the Literature.Journal of clinical medicine · 2024Review
- Quantifying suicide contagion at population scale.Science advances · 2024Article
- Changes in Media Reporting Quality and Suicides Following National Media Engagement on Responsible Reporting of Suicide in Canada: Changements de la Qualité des reportages dans les médias sur les suicides suite à l'engagement des médias nationaux à la déclaration responsable du suicide au Canada.Canadian journal of psychiatry. Revue canadienne de psychiatrie · 2024Observational
- Article
- Canadian news media coverage of suicide during the COVID-19 pandemic.Social psychiatry and psychiatric epidemiology · 2023Article
- Forecasting call and chat volumes at online helplines for mental health.BMC public health · 2023Article
- Media coverage of Canadian Veterans, with a focus on post traumatic stress disorder and suicide.BMC psychiatry · 2022Article
- The Tool for Evaluating Media Portrayals of Suicide (TEMPOS): Development and Application of a Novel Rating Scale to Reduce Suicide Contagion.International journal of environmental research and public health · 2022Article
- Patterns of suicide mortality in England and Wales before and after the suicide of the actor Robin Williams.Social psychiatry and psychiatric epidemiology · 2021Article
- Suicide and the agent-host-environment triad: leveraging surveillance sources to inform prevention.Psychological medicine · 2021Article
- The global impact of celebrity suicides: implications for prevention.World psychiatry : official journal of the World Psychiatric Association (WPA) · 2021Article
- Suicide Contagion.Current trauma reports · 2021Review
- Assessing Adherence to Responsible Reporting of Suicide Guidelines in the Canadian News Media: A 1-year Examination of Day-to-day Suicide Coverage: Évaluer la conformité au journalisme responsable en matière de directives sur le suicide dans les médias canadiens d'information: Un examen d'une année de la couverture quotidienne du suicide.Canadian journal of psychiatry. Revue canadienne de psychiatrie · 2020Article
- Why social justice matters: a context for suicide prevention efforts.International journal for equity in health · 2020Review
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
4 authors.
Funding
Abstract
backgroundEvidence suggests that suicide mortality increases after high-profile suicide deaths. Indeed, suicide in the United States increased disproportionately after the suicide by suffocation of well-known comedian Robin Williams in August 2014. Such increases are often attributed to irresponsible media coverage of the suicide contributing to "copycat suicides." However, recent research indicates that the mainstream Canadian media have significantly improved their suicide coverage, with high fidelity to suicide reporting guidelines after Williams' death. As such, the aim of the present study is to examine suicide mortality in Canada after Robin Williams' suicide.
methodsWe obtained deidentified monthly suicide count data from January 1999 to December 2015 stratified by age, sex, and method of suicide from Statistics Canada. We used time-series analyses to estimate the expected number of suicides in the months following Robin Williams' death. This was done using a seasonal autoregressive integrated moving averages (SARIMA) method. Expected suicides were then compared with observed suicides.
resultsAugust 2014 was the month with the highest number of suicides from 2010 to 2015. The time-series model indicated a 16% increase in the expected number of suicides during the months from August to December 2014 inclusive. Moreover, males over 30 had the greatest number of excess suicides, and suicides by suffocation (the method used by Robin Williams) were also higher in August and the following months.
interpretationSuicides increased in Canada after Robin Williams' death, despite the improved mainstream media coverage witnessed in other studies. Other factors (e.g., social and alternative media) may have contributed to the observed increase in suicide.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.