The Portrayal of Suicidal Behavior in Police Television Series

Fictional suicidal behavior can affect the public as a risk or a protective factor, and it may reflect how suicide is perceived in a society. However, surprisingly little is known of how suicidal behavior is portrayed in television series. The aim of this study was to investigate the characteristics of televised fatal and non-fatal suicidal behavior, preventative interventions, and the portrayal of people bereaved by suicide. All episodes (N = 475) of four Belgian police series were screened against inclusion and exclusion criteria, and 87 episodes with a total of 54 suicides, 13 attempted suicides, 13 suicide threats, and 20 characters bereaved by suicide were included in a quantitative and qualitative analysis. Televised suicidal behavior was primarily motivated by external motives, such as social/relational issues or the death of a significant other, and to a lesser extent, by internal motives, such as mental or physical health related issues. Interventions were likely to prevent suicide. People bereaved by suicide were mostly portrayed as individuals seeking justice. Shame, revenge, and escape were the major qualitative themes associated with suicidal behavior. Two prototypes emerged: a ruthless, "psychopath" type criminal, who kills him/herself before being arrested, and a suicidal individual struggling with devastating life events. The study provided unique insights in how suicidal behavior is televised in Belgian police series. Though some characteristics were portrayed adequately, mental health related issues were overlooked, spectacular suicide methods were overrepresented, and the bereaved characters were mostly unidimensional revengers. Strategies for improving the accuracy of televised suicidal behavior should be studied.

Celebrity suicide on Twitter: Activity, content and network analysis related to the death of Swedish DJ Tim Bergling alias Avicii

BACKGROUND

Media recommendations for suicide reporting are recommended to prevent imitative suicide but little is known about social media reactions to different revelations about celebrity suicide.

METHODS

Using the Twitter Application Programming Interface (API), we recorded public tweets mentioning Avicii from the day when his death was reported (N = 2,865,292). We compared that data with a dataset of random tweets. Furthermore, we recorded tweets including suicide in 124 languages before Avicii's death (N = 5,939,107). We processed English tweets mentioning Avicii with the Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC) to quantify the frequency of affects and related linguistic signals. We also processed the text of tweets to detect tweets mentioning the suicide method, and we retrieved the list of followers of users who tweeted about the method. We constructed reply networks from the dataset, analysing three networks corresponding to the major news events about Avicii's death.

RESULTS

Avicii's suicide sparked immediate strong interest with both positive (χ² = 781.06, p < 10^-6) and negative emotional expressions (χ² = 1518.5, p < 10^-6) in comparison to baseline levels. Subsequent revelations were associated with smaller peaks with mainly negative emotional content after Avicii's death was revealed as a suicide (χ² = 33.2, p < 10^-6 and after news about the suicide method (χ² = 274.93, p < 10^-6). Tweeting about the suicide method was infrequent, but twitter users who covered the method had more followers that users who did not (D = 0.1675, p < 10^-6; t = 19.87, p < 10^-6), and a noteworthy number of users had considerable exposure to the suicide method.

LIMITATIONS

This was a descriptive analysis.

CONCLUSIONS

Twitter users showed strong interest in news about Avicii's death and Avicii's suicide, but less so in the suicide method, and showed distinct tweeting behaviours based on the different revelations.

Traditional and new media's influence on suicidal behavior and contagion

The role of nonfictional and fictional media in suicide contagion has been well established, ostensibly beginning with the publication of Goethe's The Sorrows of Young Werther in 1774. In recent decades, the emergence of several new forms of media (e.g. websites, social media, blogs, smartphone applications) has revolutionized the communication and social interaction paradigms. This article reviews "the Werther effect" (or suicide contagion related to media), special populations who are more influential or susceptible, current media reporting guidelines and their effectiveness, and the latest research on new media and its effect on suicide and suicide contagion. The aim is to update recommendations on how to mitigate the potential negative effects of both traditional and new media on suicidal behavior and suicide contagion.

Towards an Ethical Framework for Publishing Twitter Data in Social Research: Taking into Account Users' Views, Online Context and Algorithmic Estimation

New and emerging forms of data, including posts harvested from social media sites such as Twitter, have become part of the sociologist's data diet. In particular, some researchers see an advantage in the perceived 'public' nature of Twitter posts, representing them in publications without seeking informed consent. While such practice may not be at odds with Twitter's terms of service, we argue there is a need to interpret these through the lens of social science research methods that imply a more reflexive ethical approach than provided in 'legal' accounts of the permissible use of these data in research publications. To challenge some existing practice in Twitter-based research, this article brings to the fore: (1) views of Twitter users through analysis of online survey data; (2) the effect of context collapse and online disinhibition on the behaviours of users; and (3) the publication of identifiable sensitive classifications derived from algorithms.