The Interwebs causes suicide. O rly?

Roy Greenslade points us to a column by Janet Street-Porter in the Independent which makes the extraordinary claim that Internet chatrooms cause suicide. Her argument appears to be that "the Internet's true negative power is to replace real relationships and friendships with cyber pals", who may convince other vulnerable children to kill themselves. What is so extraordinary about the claim?

(a) It ignores all of the evidence we have of teenage suicide epidemics that owe nothing at all to the Internet. One high-profile epidemic of teen suicides befell the islands of Micronesia in the 1970s and 1980s and is highlighted by Malcolm Gladwell in The Tipping Point. Another befell  late C18th Europe as an estimated 2000 readers of Goethe's masterpiece Die Leiden des jungen Werther ("The Sorrows of Young Werther") killed themselves in emulation of the novel's hero.

(b) The best evidence I have suggests that every time the mass media reports a high-profile suicide, according to the British Medical Journal, it inspires additional suicides. Drawing on the BMJ report and Robert Cialdini's wonderful book Influence, Scott Adams summarises the current understanding of this phenomenon as

"Every time the media makes a big deal about a high profile suicide there’s a 100% chance it inspires additional suicide."

Is this true? I've no idea. It looks plausible. If anyone knows a counter-argument I'd be fascinated to hear it.

It is a tragedy when anyone elects to take their own life. It is culturally remarkable when the phenomenon takes on the mimetic qualities of an epidemic. Since there is a substantial body of evidence that both of these phenomena considerably predate the Internet there is no good reason to write a newspaper column blaming the Internet for people killing themselves - unless you have some evidence that there are additional instances of suicide since the advent of the Internet amongst those exposed to it and/or establish some sort of causative link. And since there is pretty good evidence that writing about suicide in a newspaper really does cause additional suicides there is exceedingly good reason not to do so.

(I should probably make more explicit than usual on this occasion that these are my own views and may not represent those of my employer.)

Comments

[Shane Richmond]

I have it on good authority that if you play the internet backwards it contains satanic messages.

[Seamus McCauley]

I think if you play Manhunt II backwards you get automatically canonised for bringing all those people back to life.

[Ian Douglas]

Playing Manhunt 2 backwards would mess with your mind even more than playing it forwards.

What happens if you play Janet Street-Porter backwards? Does she make sense?

[Seamus McCauley]

Ian - for my money the house she built in Farringdon (see http://qurl.com/42pny) is the clearest testament to the coherence of her cultural contribution.

[Shane Richmond]

It's probably just the angle of the picture but it really looks as though JSP forgot to put a door on her house.

[Abi]

If you're agreeing that excessive media reportage can incite suicide (or indeed any other activity), aren't you by extension including online media (i.e. teh interweb) in that coverage?

[Seamus McCauley]

Abi - no evidence either way. The study cited looked at media in the reporting sense, not Internet conversations.

We might assume that if newspaper reports of suicide cause additional suicides then Internet conversations on the subject have the same effect. But calling both experiences "media" over-simplifies the extent to which reading a newspaper is a similar or different type of activity to chatting online, or more simply conflates content and conversation. I'm not sure whether the fact that suicide content causes more suicides is likely to map to the assumption that suicide chat does the same. It might actually reduce instances by making people feel less alone. To have an idea better than a guess, though, I think we'd need another study.

[Ilana]

Pictures of JSP on the internet do indeed make me want to kill myself...