Detecting Changes in Suicide Content Manifested in Social Media Following Celebrity Suicides

By Mrinal Kumar, Mark Dredze, Glen A. Coppersmith, M. de Choudhury. 2015

164 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The Werther effect describes the increased rate of completed or attempted suicides following the depiction of an individual's suicide in the media, typically a celebrity. We present findings on the prevalence of this effect in an online platform: r/SuicideWatch on Reddit. We examine both the posting activity and post content after the death of ten high-profile suicides. Posting activity increases following reports of celebrity suicides, and post content exhibits considerable changes that indicate increased suicidal ideation. Specifically, we observe that post-celebrity suicide content is more likely to be inward focused, manifest decreased social concerns, and laden with greater anxiety, anger, and negative emotion. Topic model analysis further reveals content in this period to switch to a more derogatory tone that bears evidence of self-harm and suicidal tendencies. We discuss the implications of our findings in enabling better community support to psychologically vulnerable populations, and the potential of building suicide prevention interventions following high-profile suicides.

Subfields: Clinical Psychology, Experimental and Cognitive Psychology, Social Psychology

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Clinical Psychology

1. Erik Cambria

In Experimental and Cognitive Psychology

1. Amit P. Sheth
2. Ugur Kursuncu
3. Manas Gaur
4. Krishnaprasad Thirunarayan
5. Erik Cambria
6. Soujanya Poria
7. Devamanyu Hazarika
8. Louis-philippe Morency

In Social Psychology

1. Shaoxiong Ji
2. Amit P. Sheth
3. Ugur Kursuncu
4. Manas Gaur
5. Krishnaprasad Thirunarayan
6. Erik Cambria

Citations in the corpus

• Suicidal Ideation Detection: A Review of Machine Learning Methods and Applications (2019, methodology): “Kumar et al. [86] examined the posting activity following the celebrity suicides, studied the effect of celebrity suicides on suicide related contents, and proposed a method to prevent the high-profile suicides.”
• Discovering Shifts to Suicidal Ideation from Mental Health Content in Social Media (2016, unknown): “We focused on a set of 14 MHs that have been examined in prior work on mental health discourse [51, 39].”
• "Let Me Tell You About Your Mental Health!": Contextualized Classification of Reddit Posts to DSM-5 for Web-based Intervention (2018, background): “" In a study by [20], a subreddit r/SuicideWatch was monitored for post-suicide progression in posting behavior on Reddit.”