Suicides Spiked After Robin Williams ’ Death, Study Says

Widespread media coverage may have contributed to a 10% increase in suicides following Robin Williams’ highly publicized death, according to a new study. In the four months after Williams’ death by suicide in August 2014, CDC data revealed that there were 18,690 deaths by suicide in the U.S. — significantly more than the 16,849 suicides that past data and trends would have predicted for that time period, according to an analysis published Wednesday in PLOS ONE. “When you looked at the data, you didn’t need statistics to see that something happened,” says study author David Fink, a doctoral candidate in epidemiology at the Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health. “You see this very large spike in August that you can just tell is off.” The study is among the first to examine the impact of celebrity suicide in the U.S. (One paper in 1996 paper focused on Nirvana singer Kurt Cobain’s death two years earlier.) While the research doesn’t prove that Williams’ death, and the resulting news coverage and social media response, caused the observed spike in suicides, a number of parallels suggest that it at least played a part, Fink says. For one thing, the jump was particularly significant among men ages 30 to 44, a demographic similar to the actor’s. A disproportionate number of the victims also died by strangulation, as many news outlets reported that Williams did, according to the paper. That overl...
Source: TIME: Health - Category: Consumer Health News Authors: Tags: Uncategorized healthytime Mental Health/Psychology onetime public health Research Suicide Source Type: news