UCL Division of Psychiatry, Faculty of Brain Sciences, University College London, 6th Floor, Maple House, 149 Tottenham Court Road, London, W1T 7NF, UK.
Camden and Islington NHS Foundation Trust, London, UK.
Soc Psychiatry Psychiatr Epidemiol. 2021 Oct;56(10):1801-1808. doi: 10.1007/s00127-021-02059-z. Epub 2021 Mar 20.
There is international evidence supporting an association between sensational reporting of suicide and a subsequent increase in local suicide rates, particularly where reporting the death of a celebrity. We aimed to explore whether the observed increase in suicides in the United States, Canada and Australia in the 5 months following the 2014 suicide of the popular actor Robin Williams was also observed in England and Wales.
We used interrupted time-series analysis and a seasonal autoregressive integrated moving averages (SARIMA) model to estimate the expected number of suicides during the 5 months following Williams' death using monthly suicide count data for England and Wales from the UK Office for National Statistics (ONS) 2013-2014.
Compared with the observed 2051 suicide deaths in all age groups from August to December 2014, we estimated that we would have expected 1949 suicides over the same period, representing no statistically significant excess.
This finding is an outlier among previous studies and contrasts with the approximately 10% increase in suicides found in similar analyses conducted in other high-income English-speaking countries with established media reporting guidelines.
有国际证据表明，耸人听闻的自杀报道与当地自杀率的随后上升之间存在关联，尤其是在报道名人死亡的情况下。我们旨在探讨在 2014 年广受欢迎的演员罗宾·威廉姆斯自杀后的 5 个月内，美国、加拿大和澳大利亚观察到的自杀人数增加是否也出现在英国英格兰和威尔士。
我们使用中断时间序列分析和季节性自回归综合移动平均 (SARIMA) 模型，使用英国国家统计局 (ONS) 2013-2014 年英国每月自杀计数数据，估算在威廉姆斯去世后的 5 个月内预计的自杀人数。
与 2014 年 8 月至 12 月所有年龄段观察到的 2051 例自杀死亡人数相比，我们估计同期会有 1949 例自杀，这没有统计学意义上的显著过剩。
这一发现是之前研究中的一个异常值，与在其他具有既定媒体报道准则的高收入英语国家进行的类似分析中发现的大约 10%的自杀人数增加形成对比。
