Robin Williams News: Actor's Suicide Influenced Others to Copy, Study Reveals
A study has revealed that the suicide of Robin Williams in August 2014 has influenced other people to do to the same.
Researchers from Columbia University have published their study in the journal PLOS One recently, and it has revealed that there was a 10 percent increase in suicide rates in America following the suicide of Williams on Aug. 11, 2014. As it was also revealed that there was a spike in the number of suicide through suffocation, the method Williams used to kill himself, the study suggests that news coverage on the actor's death may have, indeed, played a factor in the increase in the suicide rates within the included period in the study.
The research made use of monthly suicides counts from the Centers for Disease Control between 1999 and 2015 as their data. While the reliable models based on the data predicted that 16,849 suicides would have occurred between August and December of 2014, records show that 1,841 more people actually killed themselves.
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The results also revealed that there was an increase in suicide cases involving men between the age of 33 and 44, although Williams was 63 at the time of his death.
"News media reports with the terms Suicide and Dead, and the term Robin Williams drastically increased in the weeks after Mr. Williams' death (Fig 1). These increments in media reports were greater than those observed in previous months and also during the August-December period in 2013. Although the maximum number of stories about Robin Williams was during the approximately four weeks after his death from August-September 2014, stories about Williams were published during the entire period from August-December 2014," goes a portion of the study published in PLOS One.
The study appears to be the first to investigate how high-profile suicides affect Americans in the era of 24-hour news. While the results suggest that there may, indeed, be a connection, it is believed that social media may be a factor, too. After all, according to a 2015 Pew Research Center, 65 percent of Americans get their news from Twitter and Facebook, and suicide support forum was filled with new posts after the death of Williams.
