Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin

There are studies dating back to the 70s that suggest publishing headlines about suicide causes people to commit suicide. Headlines about murder-suicides similarly caused an uptick in murder suicides.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17750236 (https://sci-hub.tw/10.1126/science.201.4357.748)

> Abstract: Fatal crashes of private, business, and corporate-executive airplanes have increased after publicized murder-suicides. The more publicity given to muder-suicide, the more crashes occurred. The increase in plane crashes occurred primarily in states where murder-suicides were publicized. These findings suggest that murder-suicide stories trigger subsequent murder-suicides, some of which are disguised as airplane accidents.

There have been some studies which found similar correlations with fatal car 'accidents.'

It's easy to speculate that comments discussing suicide, such as yours or mine, might also plausibly cause suicides. Perhaps that's something for you to consider.



Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: