Speaking of Psychology: Suicide contagion, with Christopher Ferguson, PhD

Conventional wisdom says that impressionable individuals will imitate all kinds of behaviors they see in movies and on TV — including suicide, especially in the wake of the TV series "13 Reasons Why." But is there such a thing as suicide contagion? The evidence is weak, according to Christopher Ferguson, PhD, who details a scientific review he conducted to try to answer that question.

Ferguson is a professor of psychology at Stetson University in DeLand, Florida. He has clinical experience in working with offender and juvenile justice populations, as well as in conducting evaluations for child protective services. His research focuses on media violence and video games in particular and he recently served as guest editor of a special issue of the APA journal Review of General Psychology on that topic.

Kim Mills : Hello and welcome to Speaking of Psychology, a podcast produced by the American Psychological Association. I'm your host, Kim Mills, and I'm speaking to you from APA’s Technology, Mind and Society conference in Washington. This is an interdisciplinary meeting aimed at assessing current efforts to understand and shape the interactions of human beings and technology for identifying priorities for future work and for promoting the exchange of ideas and collaboration among participants.

Dr. Christopher Ferguson is a professor of psychology at Stetson University in DeLand, Florida. He has clinical experience in working with offender and juvenile justice populations, as well as in conducting evaluations for child protective services. His research focuses on media violence and video games in particular and he recently served as guest editor of a special issue of the APA journal Review of General Psychology on that topic.

But he's here today to talk about suicide contagion, which fits in with his interest in how political pressure, social panics and the so-called "culture wars" can distort media research. Welcome, Dr. Ferguson.

Christopher Ferguson : Thanks for having me here today.

Kim Mills : So, the first question that comes to my mind is whether your research has shown that there is such a thing as suicide contagion?

Christopher Ferguson : Yeah, that's a great question. So, I mean it really matters a contagion by who or what is really sort of an essential issue. So, there are a third of these pools of research on suicide contagion—one is by peers, so if one of your friends or someone in your social environment commits suicide, does that make you more likely to commit suicide if you're kind of on that edge of considering it?

The second is by news media, so coverage of actual suicides and news media.

And the third is with fictional television shows like "13 Reasons Why" or even heavy metal music like Ozzy Osbourne and things like that.

And the research probably is pretty solid in terms of there being some sort of pure contagion type of effect that for individuals who are at risk for suicide having a close associate commit suicide may elevate their risk somewhat. The news is a little bit or news media effects are a little bit dodgy but there seems to be some research there suggesting there may or may not be some effects wouldn't use media contagion.

But, I was really concerned with fictional media sort of looking at shows like "13 Reasons Why" and it's kind of like fictional media portrayals of suicide and whether that would increase the likelihood of viewers committing suicide or thinking about suicide themselves—and the literature's been going on for several decades, so it's kind of curious of summarizing that with a with a meta analytic procedure—kind of looking at what are the overall trends in the research to date and although there's certainly some heterogeneity, there's some differences between studies in terms of whether effects seem to exist or not.

Overall, my analysis suggested that the data we have currently is probably not sufficient to support these kind of concerns that we're having about shows like "13 Reasons Why," there does not seem to be a conclusive body of evidence to suggest that suicide contagion happens to fictional media at very least.

Kim Mills : So, there was a lot of publicity last year around the article that was published by I think it was the Journal of the American Medical Association—we got that right—that saw a big spike around the time of the broadcast and what they found was a lot of people doing Internet searches for suicide. Is that not a good piece of research?

Christopher Ferguson : It's not so much that it wasn't a good piece of research. It's more that it wasn't clear from those searches whether those individuals would be doing searches were intending to commit suicide necessarily or the theorists are curious about the topic or even may have been seeking help because they had been thinking about suicide previously. So, it wasn't really sure that the search is translated into real behavior and the example might be is that, you know, in all likelihood after we've had a lot of news recently about you know gun violence and tragic shootings that it's very likely that after tragic shooting occurs, you see a lot more searches about gun violence, mass shootings, so on and so forth.

But that doesn't mean that the majority those individuals are you know likely to go out and commit those shootings as well. So, it seems to be the same sort of an issue—people were doing a lot more searches about suicide and suicide related issues, but it doesn't seem to be that that was an indication that those individuals were inclined to actually engage in suicide or that that translated into an increased risk of suicide behaviors among viewers.

Kim Mills : Did you look at all in to the kinds of messages that the producers are putting on the program now to kind of warn people? I mean there's you know there's some concern about triggering. Doesn’t it help if there's some message at the beginning of the program or at the end of the program for resources?

Christopher Ferguson : Yeah, I mean it's there can be helpful for people who are maybe offended by content—you know, sort of sort of warm people what's coming so that they're not surprised by it. I think at this point it brought there are probably relatively few people to learn who would learn that "13 Reasons Why" is about suicide, so it's probably not, you know, in that sense it's probably not a huge deal. It's always good to have people to be informed in terms of where they want to decide if they want to be exposed to a particular content issue or not.

But in terms of, you know, sort of trigger warnings as you mentioned being sort of a fix for possible effects, there actually was some research that I come across at a conference a year or two ago that actually suggested that often times trigger warnings can actually increase people's anxiety about content—so have kind of a paradoxical effect. They weren't looking at suicide and media, they're looking more like even like Shakespeare novels and you know sexual content and violent content.

But, that often times if you know if you just sort of expose people to something they don't think it's necessarily a huge deal, but if you warn them about it in advance then they actually are sort of primed to worry about it and may actually have a bit more of a written emotional reaction to it then if you just left it alone.

It depends on what the content is, probably, the super shocking the trigger warning might help if it's maybe not so shocking then it might actually be kind of paradoxical in terms of its effect.

Kim Mills : Did you look at contagion in other realms? I mean, there's a lot of writing research around oh, I don't know, I mean school shootings, for example, and whether those happen to be contagious or even fashion trends or you know things that people do with the stock market, for example.

Christopher Ferguson : Right yeah, well we did this study was limited just to the fictional media suicide contagion issues. Of course, there is a lot of discussion you know with these tragic shootings about the issue of gun violence and the possibility that news media coverage of school shootings or mass shootings may actually serve as a motivating factor for some of these shooters or actually it's not a lot of really good data on that, so they had not been a lot of studies looking at whether the frequency of gun violence increases or decreases after news coverage. So, a lot of that still is very speculative. So, some of that is perhaps based on a misimpression that the majority of mass shooters are out for attention. Some appear to base, so there have certainly been examples of like the Sandy Hook shooting or the Virginia texture two who referred back to Columbine, for instance, so this seems to be sometime at least some identification effect between some shooters.

But you don't see that with all of them or even necessarily the majority. So I'm not sure that Firenze was taking steps like not using shooters names is necessary going to have a big effect on gun violence or mass shootings, but on the other hand there isn't really any harm either in avoiding using shooters' names.

So, if there's no harm, might as well do it. As smooth as you know and the off chance maybe there's some small effect there, but it's probably not going to be the main thing that solves issues like gun violence or mass shootings.

Kim Mills : So, what are the next steps in terms of research for the social contagion?

Christopher Ferguson : Yeah, well we need you know a lot better, more transparent and open science research. There's been kind of a common theme in meteor research in general including violent video game research and body image research and other fields that a lot of the research have been done in the past was not very transparent. Some of it isn't replicating very well when people are coming and trying to replicate some of those studies. So, a lot of things that we thought were sort of absolutely true maybe 15 years ago or 20 years ago are now proving very difficult to replicate.

So, we're really in need in this field and another media related fields for a lot of really solid, well-designed, pre-registered, transparent open science research and that was one of the interesting things with this meta-analysis I conducted with this field was that you know a lot of the studies were okay, but there were a lot of common issues like with a lot of the survey designs they would ask about TV shows kids had watched and then ask them how they felt about suicide—you know, are you thinking about suicide?

It's not that hard to guess the hypothesis of that study and sometimes that can change people's behavior one way or another. So, it would be really good to see a lot more studies that are trying to get away from that masking the hypothesis better, following people over longer periods of time to see what the long-term effects are and I think that would help it loose a day whether these types of effects do or do not exist in this field. So, and we're actually trying to do a little bit of that as Testing University and we're just now starting a longitudinal study of youth and their viewing habits and mood related issues, including suicide.

Kim Mills : Great, I look forward to seeing that when you get published.

Well thank you very much Dr. Ferguson for joining us today.

Christopher Ferguson : Well thank you for having me on. I appreciate it. It's a pleasure.

Kim Mills :Thank you for joining our podcast. Speaking of Psychology is part of the APA podcast network, which includes other great podcasts such as APA Journals Dialogue, about the latest and most exciting psychological research, and Progress Notes, which discusses the practice of psychology. You can find all APA podcasts on iTunes, Stitcher or wherever you get your podcasts. You can also go to our website, www.speakingofpsychology.org, to listen to more episodes and see more resources on the topics we discuss. I'm Kim Mills, with the American Psychological Association, and this is Speaking of Psychology.