It’s official now, though I already knew it. Television shows have the power to tip fragile young people into taking their own lives and as a society we’ve consistently underestimated the power of media to influence behavior.
Social contagion is real, and we have had data for years to prove it. Teenagers are particularly prone to it. Social contagion is why we see suicide clusters in communities after there is one suicide.
People often deny that media has any influence on their behavior, but behavioral scientists know this isn’t true. They don’t realize that the influence is beneath the level of conscious awareness. When one Super Bowl ad costs 5.3 million dollars, it’s simply naive to assume otherwise. Advertisers know the power they wield and they will a premium for it.
In a report by NPR on 4/30/19 it becomes clear:
“When Netflix’s 13 Reasons Why was released two years ago, depicting the life of a teenager who decided to take her own life, educators and psychologists warned the program could lead to copycat suicides. Now, a study funded by the National Institutes of Health shows that those concerns may have been warranted.
In the month following the show’s debut in March 2017, there was a 28.9% increase in suicide among Americans ages 10–17, said the study, published Monday in the Journal of the American…
