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Researchers say suicide contagion after celebrity deaths is real - as they study Robin Williams, Kate Spade and Anthony Bourdain
Celebrity suicides can act as a 'contagion' - triggering thousands of people to consider taking their own lives, a new study warned.
Researchers analyzed the 'rapid and expansive spread' of suicidal behavior related to the deaths of three iconic individuals, including actor Robin Williams, fashion designer Kate Spade and travel writer Anthony Bourdain.
They found a thousand-fold increase in people fantasizing about suicide following Williams' death in 2014, showing how the contagion spreads quickly.
The team reported that they hope their findings will provide a framework for understanding suicidal contagion so they can better understand, prevent and contain its spread in the future.
Robin Williams (left) committed suicide by hanging in 2014, creating a surge in Americans taking their own lives in the same manner and Kate Spade (right) committed suicide by hanging in 2018
Researchers at Columbia University reported that there wasn't one single factor that causes suicide or suicidal thoughts but some have been attributed to social, or contagious, processes.
People's proximity or familiarity with other people who have thought about, attempted or committed suicide have been found to contribute to them developing their own suicidal thoughts or actions, the team said.
They focused on the spikes in suicide rates following Williams' death and the subsequent deaths of Kate Spade and Anthony Bourdain - both of whom died just days apart in 2018.
The study, published in the journal Science Advances, analyzed data from total weekly calls made to the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline, a 24-hour call center, to estimate how many people experienced suicidal thoughts and mortality data in the National Vital Statistics System.
'The model we developed shows how suicide contagion, including both suicidal ideation and deaths, spreads quickly following the suicide deaths of celebrities whose lives and work are known and likely meaningful to large portions of the population,' he added.
Suicide is now the ninth leading cause of death for people ages 10 to 64, and was responsible for more than 48,000 deaths in 2021, amounting to about one death every 11 minutes, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)
Jeffrey Shaman, the study's co-author and Columbia University professor, said there was a substantial increase in call volume to the Lifeline following all three celebrity's deaths, but Williams' suicide seemed to have a bigger impact.
'The 2018 case is similar, although the magnitude of the suicide contagion rate changes following news of the Spade and Bourdain suicides was roughly half,' Shaman said.
'Among the two celebrity suicide events, the number of excess suicide deaths was approximately double following the 2014 Williams event, potentially reflecting differences in communication and media attention following each event and the level of population connection with the deceased.'
Williams was a beloved actor known for his roles in the the critically acclaimed films Good Morning, Vietnam (1987), Mrs. Doubtfire (1993), and Good Will Hunting (1997), among many others.
He was just 63 years old when he committed suicide by hanging, and his death shook the world with data showing there was a 32 percent increase in people taking their own lives using the same method, according to a 2018 study by Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health.
'Although we cannot determine with certainty that these deaths are attributable to the death of Robin Williams, we found both a rapid increase in suicides in August 2014, and specifically suffocation suicides, that paralleled the time and method of Williams' death,' the study's co-author David Fink, said at the time.
Anthony Bourdain was a travel writer who committed suicide by hanging mere days after Kate Spade in June 2018
Now the researchers said their newest findings mirror the 2018 study, documenting that suicide rates in the US increased 37 percent between 2000 and 2018, but decreased five percent between 2018 and 2020 before returning to their peak in 2021.
Spade and Bourdain died in within three days of each other in June 2018 - both by hanging - and brought attention to the soaring number of suicides in the US.
'In both the 2014 and 2018 simulations, the increased rates of contagion lasted about two weeks before returning to baseline levels,' Shaman said.
Suicide is now the ninth leading cause of death for people ages 10 to 64, and was responsible for more than 48,000 deaths in 2021, amounting to about one death every 11 minutes, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
The study's co-author Professor Katherine Keyes said their ultimate goal moving forward 'is to work toward a point where a suicide contagion model can inform a rapid response geared at preventing suicide.'