Speaking of Psychology - Suicide Contagion (SOP58)

Episode Date: June 6, 2018

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. APA is currently seeking proposals for APA 2020, click here to learn more https://convention.apa.org/proposals Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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 him with his interest in how political pressure, social panics, and the so-called culture wars can distort media research. Welcome, Dr. Ferguson. Thanks for having me here today. So the first question that comes to my mind is whether your research has shown that there is such a thing as suicide contagion. Yeah, that's a great question. So, I mean, it really matters. Contagent by who or what is really sort of an essential issue. So there really are three pools of research on suicide contagion.

One is by peers. So if one of your friends or someone in your social environment commit 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 peer 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 media effects are a little bit dodgier, but there seems to be some research there are suggesting there may or may not be some effects with news media contagion. But I was really concerned with fictional media. Instead 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 has been going on for several decades, so I was kind of curious of summarizing that 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 through fictional media at the very least. 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. Was that not a good piece of research?

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 who were doing those searches were intending to commit suicide necessarily. Or if they were curious about the topic or even may have been seeking help because it they had been thinking about suicide previously. So it wasn't really sure that those searches translated into real behavior. And the example might be is that in all likelihood,

after, of course, we've had a lot of news recently about gun violence and tragic shootings, that it's very likely that after a 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 of those individuals are 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. Did you look at all into the kinds of messages that the producers are putting on the program now

to kind of warn people? I mean, there's some concern about triggering, does it help if there's some? if there's some message at the beginning of the program or at the end of the program for resources? Yeah, I mean, they can be helpful for people who are maybe offended by content, you know, sort of warm people of what's coming

so that they're not surprised by it. I think at this point, 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 whether they want to decide, they want to be exposed to a particular content issue or not.

But in terms of trigger warnings, as you mentioned, being sort of a fix for possible effects, there actually was some research that I'd come across at a conference a year or two ago that actually suggested that oftentimes trigger warnings can actually increase people's anxiety about content, so have kind of a paradoxical effect. And they weren't looking at suicide theme media.

They were looking more like even like Shakespeare novels and sexual content and violent content. But that oftentimes 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 than if you had just left it alone to some extent.

It depends on what the content is probably. If it's 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. 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 things that people do with the stock market, for example. Right, yeah. Well, this study was limited just to the fictional media suicide contagion issues. Of course, there is a lot of discussion 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. There actually is not a lot of really good data on that. So they have now 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. Some of that is perhaps based on a misimpression that the majority of mass shooters are out for attention. appear to be. So there have certainly been examples of like the Sandy Hook shooter or the Virginia

Tech shooter who referred back to Columbine for instance. So there seems to be sometime at least some identification effect between some shooters. But you don't necessarily see that with all of them or even necessarily the majority. So I'm not sure that for instance taking steps like not using shooters' names is necessarily 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 I suppose you know not on the off chance maybe there's some small effect there but it's probably not going to be the the main thing that solves issues like

gun violence or mass shootings so what are the next steps in terms of research for the social contagion yeah yeah well we need a lot better more transparent and open science research has been kind of a common theme in media 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 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 in other 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, is that 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?

And 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 elucidate whether these types of effects do or do not exist in this field. So we're actually trying to do a little bit of that at Stetson University.

And we're just now starting a longitudinal study of youth and their viewing habits and in mood related issues including suicide. Great. I look forward to seeing that when you get it published. Same here. Yeah, all right. Well, thank you very much Dr. Ferguson for joining us today. Well, thank you for having me on. I appreciate it. It's a pleasure. Thank you for joining our podcast. Speaking of psychology is part of the APA podcast network which includes other great podcasts such as APA Journal's 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.spokenof psychology.org, to listen to more episodes and see more resources on the topics we discuss. Thanks again for joining us. I'm Kim Mills with the American Psychological Association, and this is Speaking of Psychology.