Suicide searches spike after '13 Reasons Why'

    The Netflix program focuses on the fictional Clay Jensen (portrayed by Dylan Minnette) who returns home from school to discover a package of cassette tapes recorded by Hannah Baker (Katherine Langford), a classmate who recently committed suicide. Based on the 2007 best-selling novel by Jay Asher, the tapes tell the story of how Hannah was driven into a downward spiral by a perfect storm of bullying, harassment and even assault.   
     While the series resonates with high school students, it apparently also prompted searches on suicide. In the days after the series began, John W. Ayers, associate research professor at San Diego State University’s Graduate School of Public Health, along with other researchers, attempted to determine its impact, recounts a news release by the university.
     The research focused on internet searches between March 31, the show’s release date, and April 18. Using data from Google Trends, a public archive of aggregated internet searches, the researchers examined phrases including the word suicide, but excluding the word squad. (The unrelated movie, Suicide Squad, had been released in 2016.)
      "All suicide queries were cumulatively 19 percent ... higher for the 19 days following the release of 13 Reasons Why, reflecting 900,000 to 1.5 million more searches than expected," the research concludes. "For 12 of the 19 days studied, suicide queries were significantly greater than expected."
     Some of the increase came from searches for phrases like "suicide hotline" (up 12 percent) or "suicide prevention"(up 23 percent), the university's news release explains. "But an alarming percentage of the spike also came from phrases like "how to commit suicide’ (up 26 percent), ‘commit suicide’ (up 18 percent) and ‘how to kill yourself’ (up 9 percent).”
    The show has been described as intense and dark. The finale contained a three-minute scene showing Hannah's suicide, which has been watched more than 130,000 times on YouTube alone.  
    “We cannot ascertain whether the searches on ‘how to kill yourself’ were made out of idle curiosity or by suicidal individuals contemplating an attempt,” concluded an editorial accompanying the research in the Journal of the American Medical Association’s Internal Medicine. “While it is likely that far more were due to the former, the producers of the series should have taken steps to mitigate the latter, as encouraged by suicide prevention specialists.”
     As one example, the show could have offered public service information, such as the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline 1-800-273-8255 (1-800-273-TALK). 
    The research, Internet Searches for Suicide Following the Release of 13 Reasons Why, was led by Ayers and published July 31 in JAMA Internal Medicine.

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