Stay by Jennifer Michael Hecht

Author:Jennifer Michael Hecht
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Yale University Press
Published: 2003-06-28T16:00:00+00:00

6

Modern Social Science on Community and Influence

It has long been suggested that one person’s suicide is destructive for other people and that suicides sometimes come in clusters. Recall, for instance, that the young women of Miletus suddenly started killing themselves at an alarming rate several hundred years before Plutarch wrote about the story in the first century B.C.E. These suicides have commonly been understood as a chain of influence.

A few early attempts to examine suicidal influence in scientific terms came in the nineteenth century. In 1845 Amariah Brigham, the first editor of the American Journal of Insanity, approvingly cited the medical statistician William Farr’s finding that imitation is often a source of suicide. Farr put it in the dramatic terms that “a single paragraph may suggest suicide to twenty persons.”1 As he explained it, the act, as well as its particular details, seizes the imaginations of those who learn of them, and who, in a moment of distress, are powerfully drawn to repeat it. A later editor of the same journal also wrote of suicidal influence and explained that some of this imitation occurs because one victim uses the fact of an earlier suicide to justify his own.2

Some observers even tried to warn their communities against publicizing a suicide. In 1837 the physician Isaac Parrish wrote of a suicide cluster. He told of an adolescent woman who killed herself a few months after the young woman had witnessed the male head of her household, called J.S., attempt suicide. Closer to her own death she had read a newspaper report of a man’s death by the intentional swallowing of arsenic. This was the method of suicide by which she herself died. Nine months later, J.S. killed himself as well. Jacob Heckstor, who lived five blocks from J.S., killed himself soon after. In the same year Albert Davis, who also lived five blocks from J.S., took his own life as well. Parrish concluded that these deaths were connected and that the newspaper reports of them were a powerful force behind the cluster. He presented his findings to the American medical profession, along with cautions against newspaper reports of suicide, but his suggestions were not heeded.3

Also in the nineteenth century, we find evidence of coroners refusing to return an object used in a suicide to the victim’s family, fearing that the gun, cup, or razor might take on a pernicious fascination and be used for the same purpose again. Likewise, coroners counseled against broadcasting any unusual method or place of suicide lest it enact a dangerous attraction upon others. Some even wrote of “emotional contagion,” while others simply spoke of imitation.4

Today’s sophisticated statistical research bears out these intuitions. Sociological studies have found evidence that a person taking his or her own life increases the likelihood of another person doing so. Parent suicides are easily the most dramatic and damaging influence, but there are examples in other communities, such as workplace, school, and neighborhood, as well as suicide clusters centered on popular culture. Media reporting on suicide can also result in suicides.

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