Department of Environmental Health Sciences, Mailman School of Public Health, Columbia University, New York, NY 10032, USA.
Columbia Climate School, Columbia University, New York, NY 10025, USA.
Sci Adv. 2024 Aug 2;10(31):eadq4074. doi: 10.1126/sciadv.adq4074. Epub 2024 Jul 31.
The spread of suicidal behavior among individuals is often described as a contagion; however, rigorous modeling of suicide as a dynamic, contagious process is minimal. Here, we develop and validate a model-inference system depicting suicide ideation and death and use it to quantify the contagion processes in the US associated with two prominent celebrity suicide events: Robin Williams during 2014 and Kate Spade and Anthony Bourdain, which occurred 3 days apart during 2018. We show that both events produced large transient increases of suicide contagion contact rates, i.e., the spread of suicidal thought and behavior, and a period of elevated suicidal ideation in the general population. Our modeling approach provides a framework for quantifying suicidal contagion and better understanding, preventing, and containing its spread.
自杀行为在个体中的传播通常被描述为一种传染现象；然而，将自杀视为一种动态、传染的过程进行严格建模的情况却很少。在这里，我们开发并验证了一个描述自杀意念和死亡的模型推断系统，并使用该系统来量化与两位著名名人自杀事件相关的美国的传染过程：罗宾·威廉姆斯（Robin Williams）在 2014 年，以及凯特·斯佩德（Kate Spade）和安东尼·波登（Anthony Bourdain），他们在 2018 年相隔三天相继自杀。我们发现这两个事件都导致了自杀传染接触率的大幅短暂增加，即自杀思想和行为的传播，以及普通人群中自杀意念的高发期。我们的建模方法为量化自杀传染提供了一个框架，有助于更好地理解、预防和控制其传播。
