A FEW HOURS AFTER Brian’s body was found, the media began calling. In the days that followed, as the Harts struggled with their shock over Brian’s death, they also struggled with the flood of journalists who clogged the telephone lines at Mary’s office and patrolled Bedford Hills in search of interviews. One afternoon Pat came home to find a television reporter waiting in his driveway. Pat politely refused to answer her questions, but when he opened the front door, the reporter began to follow him in. After she was finally persuaded to leave, she drove into Bedford Hills and found a teenager on the street to interview. That night the Harts watched the evening news as a boy who had never met Brian was asked why teenagers kill themselves. “I guess these rich kids don’t know what to do with their time,” he replied.
Brian’s death made the headlines in every newspaper the Harts saw: “Suicide Stuns W’chester,” wrote the New York Post, and in the following edition: “Town Mourns Suicide Teen.” The New York Times was more cautious: “Another Teen-Ager Is Believed a Suicide in Westchester Area.” The Gannett Westchester Reporter Dispatch wondered, “Another Teen-age Suicide?”
Brian Hart’s death brought the number of teenage suicides in the Putnam-Westchester area to five in less than six weeks. Ten days after the suicide of Robbie DeLaValliere on February 4, 1984, Justin Spoonhour had hanged himself. Two days later eighteen-year-old Jimmy Pellechi shot himself. Eight days later Arnold Caputo, nineteen, hanged himself in his parents’ home in Mount Vernon. And now Brian. With each death the press coverage grew exponentially, and by now the “Westchester suicides,” as they were called, were the top story on the nightly news, not only in New York but across the country. The suburbs north of New York City responded with a growing feeling of panic. At first many had believed that the series of suicides was a coincidence. None of the teenagers had known each other or attended the same school. But as the toll began to mount, the suspicion grew that these deaths were somehow connected. Had one suicide triggered another? Can reading about suicide in the newspaper or hearing about it on TV cause suicide? Is suicide contagious? When would it stop? Would it stop? Who was next?
Certainly the hysteria was contagious. Crisis hotlines, school officials, guidance counselors, and therapists were swamped by calls from anxious parents seeking reassurance. “My son’s been withdrawn lately,” they’d say. “I don’t want him to end up like those other boys.” News programs publicized the warning signs of teenage suicide, and parents checked their children for symptoms of depression. “You get paranoid,” said the Westchester mother of a thirteen-year-old at a workshop on adolescent suicide. “You look for red eyes to see if he hasn’t been sleeping. You look to see if he’s sleeping too much.”
Therapists struggled to explain the situation. Suicide, said one Westchester psychiatrist, is “a contagious illness. It’s not something that spreads from one person to another, like a cold. It’s something that’s in the air, in the culture, in the environment.” In an article on the “Westchester suicides,” Susan Blumenthal, head of the Suicide Research Unit at the National Institute of Mental Health, speculated that suicide could become “sort of like punk rock—something that catches on.” Even Westchester County mental health commissioner Eugene Aronowitz, who had from the start firmly insisted the suicides were unconnected, was ruffled. “They seem to be related to each other because one seems to be kicking off the other,” he told Tom Brokaw on NBC Nightly News, “so to that extent, until we put a stop to it in some way, we’ve got an epidemic here.”
On April 7, three weeks after Brian Hart’s death, eighteen-year-old Kelly Keagan of Carmel, a small town in Putnam County, hanged herself in her dormitory room at Mount St. Mary College in Newburgh.
On Friday, May 25, seventeen-year-old Charles Castaldo Jr. shot himself in the head in a bedroom of his father’s home in Greenburgh, near Scarsdale.
The following Monday nineteen-year-old Kevin Harlan was found hanging in a stairwell outside a church in the tiny middle-class community of Sparkill across the Hudson River in Rockland County. His death brought the number of teenage suicides in the tricounty area north of New York City to eight in four months.
As horrifying as the “Westchester suicides” were, they were hardly unique. Indeed, they merely added to the growing evidence that youth suicides tend to occur in bunches, evidence that, in the 1980s, focused America’s attention on adolescent suicide as never before. Even as Justin Spoonhour and Brian Hart were taking their lives, in Arlington, Texas, a Dallas suburb, there were five youth suicides in the first four months of 1984. In Beverly Hills, California, there had been three between January and April. And before that, starting in February 1983, there had been eight in fourteen months in Plano, Texas. In Columbus, Ohio, there had been five in a single month, including three freshmen at the same high school in one weekend. In 1982, in Cheyenne, Wyoming, there had been three in seventeen days. In 1980, in Englewood, Colorado, three in five months at the same high school. In 1979, in West Milford, New Jersey, six in twenty months. Beginning in 1978, in the North Shore suburbs of Chicago, twenty-eight in seventeen months.
Was there something in one suicide that acted as a “triggering incident” for another? Did each successive suicide lower the threshold for the next, as a firecracker, once lit, detonates the rest of the string? Adding to the fear was the confusion of the experts who struggled to explain the phenomenon. Their bafflement was reflected in the variety of words they used to describe the various episodes: epidemic, rash, copycat syndrome, serial suicides, ripple effect, cascade, clump, contagion, fever, outbreak, chain, follow the leader, domino effect. Eventually, they would settle on the slightly more clinical-sounding cluster.
While these terms seem to suggest that self-destruction might be catching, in the fashion of measles or the flu, suicide doesn’t pick its victims that randomly. Researchers have long suspected that when one suicide occurs, it may lower the threshold for vulnerable people in the same geographic vicinity. People with a previous suicide in the family, as we have learned, have an incidence of suicide eight times higher than the general population. Yale researchers Bruce Rounsaville and Myrna Weissman studied sixty-two patients who were seen in an emergency room following suicide attempts; four had made their attempt within four weeks after the suicide or suicide attempt of someone to whom they were close. In three of the four cases a similar method was used. They concluded that clustered suicidal behavior was not infrequent. In certain settings, often confined places in which there is a rigid social structure, one suicide seems to spur others. Clusters have occurred in prisons, boarding schools, colleges, army barracks, and mental hospitals. After a suicide most hospitals routinely place the rest of the patients under heightened security or “suicide watch.”
Adolescents, at a developmental stage in which they are highly suggestible, may be especially prone to imitation in suicide. Various estimates suggest that clusters may account for 1 to 5 percent of teen suicides—suicides that wouldn’t have occurred at that time if the victims hadn’t been “exposed.” “When a suicide happens, even people who don’t know the person are affected,” says former Harvard psychologist Douglas Powell, who has counseled students after campus suicides. “One always has the thought, ‘This could happen to me. Is it going to happen to me? If it happened to him and he didn’t seem troubled . . .’” One adolescent suicide will, in a sense, bring other suicidal adolescents to the surface, but experts agree that the suicide can influence only someone who is already vulnerable. “Reading about a suicide does not make someone suicidal,” emphasized Judie Smith, the program director at the Suicide and Crisis Center in Dallas who worked with Plano students, parents, and teachers after the 1983 cluster. “But if that person is already at risk of suicide, the media reports may inadvertently convey the message that it’s okay to kill yourself, that suicide is an acceptable solution to your problems.” Westchester psychiatrist Samuel Klagsbrun says, “When one kid actually goes ahead and does the unthinkable, it’s almost as if it gives permission to others to also do the unthinkable.”
The more attention a suicide provokes, the more a “permission” is apt to seem like an invitation. “The way we handle this frightens me,” says psychologist Pamela Cantor. “There is often so much adulation after a teenage suicide—they name a school building after him, they have a ceremony, they dismiss school for the day. A kid who has felt lonely and out of it can suddenly go from being a nonentity to being a hero.” A letter to columnist Ann Landers described a thirteen-year-old Cincinnati girl who had been unable to make the cheerleading squad or to get admitted into any campus club. When she won a raffle at a pizza parlor entitling her to a pizza dinner for fifteen, she turned down the prize, saying she didn’t have fourteen friends. A few weeks later she killed herself. At her funeral more than two hundred schoolmates signed the guest book, wept, and placed flowers on her casket.
After Arnold Caputo was buried, front-page articles described the posthumous outpouring of grief and affection for the young rock musician, noting that according to his wishes he was buried with his guitar. “Is it important for us to know that?” wonders a Westchester high school counselor. “A troubled kid who reads that may say, ‘Hey, I’ll go out with my basketball or my hockey stick.’” Like Tom Sawyer, who enjoyed fantasizing about the effect of his death on the Widow Douglas, a vulnerable teenager may imagine the effect of his suicide on those left behind. “I’ve talked to lots of people, like over a hamburger at lunch, about who would be at our funerals if we died,” says a Texas teenager. “If you’re feeling depressed one day and you feel you don’t have any friends, you think, ‘If I died, whoever came to my funeral would be my friends.’” A suicidal teenager may have a magical belief that he’ll be able to savor the reaction to his death. But unlike Tom Sawyer, he won’t be around to attend his own funeral. A lonely, overweight thirteen-year-old California boy who shot himself wrote in his suicide note, “Please tell my classmates what happened and watch if they are sad or if they laugh.”
If the notion of imitation seems understandable, there is disagreement on what constitutes a cluster. In 1983, Plano, a well-to-do bedroom community twenty miles from Dallas, became embedded in the national consciousness as a prototype when eight adolescents—seven of them students at the same school—killed themselves within fourteen months. (There were, as well, at least sixteen attempts.) After the fourth suicide the national media descended on Plano and competed to describe its expensive homes, manicured lawns, and six-foot “privacy fences.” It was, as one newspaper noted, a town in which adolescents seemed to have “everything to live for.” The town resented the attention, and many people blamed the press for the subsequent suicides. The story was a natural: Plano fit a stereotype as the dark underside of the American dream. “Suicides in Paradise,” headlined the Los Angeles Herald Examiner. “Teen-age Suicide in the Sun Belt—An Idyllic Dallas Suburb Is Discovering the Sorrows of Rootlessness and Isolation” was the headline in Newsweek. The San Antonio Light: “Plano: Where Suicide Is Preppy.”
But tagging upwardly mobile boomtowns as incubators for adolescent suicide gave communities like Plano an undue share of notoriety. Over the past few decades, clusters have taken place in cities, suburbs, Inuit villages, farming communities, and on college campuses and Indian reservations. In some instances subsequent suicides knew a previous victim; in others they may have heard of other suicides through word of mouth or the media. Some clusters drew a great deal of publicity; others were hardly mentioned. In some the adolescents used similar methods; in others they used a variety.
When the media turned to the teenage suicides occurring north of New York City, it treated Westchester and Plano as if they were virtually interchangeable. Ladies’ Home Journal, for instance, portrayed Westchester County as “a sprawling bedroom suburb that could be the definition of upward mobility.” Television news reports ran footage of gracious homes, rolling hills, and young girls show-jumping horses. The word affluent was used so often that it made wealth sound like a terminal illness. “‘Contagious’ Teen Suicides Worry Town” was the headline for a story in the Dallas Times Herald, which like many other accounts dismissed the “affluent suburb” of New York as if the suicides had occurred in a single community, not in eight different towns in three different counties with a total population of more than a million. The eight teenagers, in fact, represented a variety of socioeconomic backgrounds and lived in towns ranging from the prosperous bedroom community of Mount Vernon, to rural Putnam County, to the racially mixed, largely blue-collar towns of Peekskill and North Tarrytown. The majority came from families whose circumstances could be described as modest. Most of the victims’ families had lived in their communities for many years. None of the victims knew one another or attended the same school. None of the suicides was directly linked to a previous suicide, although the teenagers may have read or heard about them. It would have been difficult not to because almost every day there seemed to be another newspaper article or television spot about the “Westchester suicides.”
The press was prone to make the cluster larger than it actually was. When Christopher Ruggiero, the seventeen-year-old son of the fire chief in Pelham, was found hanged by his bathrobe sash in his bedroom closet on February 21, five days after Jimmy Pellechi’s death, most newspapers assumed he had become the fourth suicide in the Westchester cluster. Several days later the county medical examiner said that Ruggiero’s death was not a suicide. People were perplexed. Then an article appeared in the New York Times on autoerotic asphyxiation (AEA). A practice familiar to medical examiners and coroners but little known to the public, AEA is a form of masturbation in which erotic sensation is enhanced by decreasing oxygen to the brain, usually by means of a noose around the neck. Although sexual pleasure, not death, is the goal, an estimated five hundred to one thousand practitioners a year—most of them young white males—go too far, become unconscious, and asphyxiate. Whether or not it results in death, the practice is clearly masochistic, risk-taking behavior. Yet deaths due to AEA are ruled accidents. Many, however, are mistakenly classified as suicides. In Christopher Ruggiero’s case, although his death was lumped with the other suicides, swelling the Westchester cluster beyond its actual extent, the medical examiner ultimately ruled that the death was due to “undetermined circumstances.”
What exactly is a cluster? Are some adolescents more vulnerable to suggestion than others? Are some towns more vulnerable than others? Do suicides cluster by method? In Plano, four were by carbon monoxide, four were by gunshot; in Westchester, five of eight were by hanging. What are the geographical boundaries of a cluster? If a teenager in New Jersey reads about a cluster in New York and kills himself, is he part of the New York cluster or the possible beginning of a New Jersey cluster? Do clusters spawn clusters? Did Plano beget Westchester? Do older people commit suicide in clusters? If there were a cluster in Harlem instead of an affluent suburb like Plano, would we hear about it? Have there always been clusters or is the media merely reporting them more fully? Does reporting contribute to clusters? Are certain kinds of coverage more lethal than others?
While the term cluster is new, the phenomenon it describes is probably as old as suicide itself. As Forbes Winslow, an English physician, observed in 1840, “The most singular feature connected with the subject of suicide is, that the disposition to sacrifice life has, at different periods, been known to prevail epidemically, from a perversion, as it has been supposed, of the natural instinct of imitation.”
There are several ways in which “the natural instinct of imitation” can work. Throughout history, during times of religious persecution, political oppression, or social upheaval, there have been instances in which a city, a country, or a religious group has been swept by a collective impulse to suicide. Classical Greek and Roman history is filled with accounts of entire towns and armies that chose death over surrender. When Philip of Macedon besieged the city of Abydos, he triggered a frenzy of suicide among its inhabitants. Hoping to stanch the self-slaughter, he withdrew his army for three days. When he returned, there was no one left alive. In AD 73, Jewish zealots defending the fortress of Masada in Israel chose death over surrender to the besieging Roman legions. Nine hundred and sixty men, women, and children died. In 1190, in York, England, more than five hundred Jews under siege by idle ex-crusaders killed one another to avoid persecution and torture; at Verdun in 1320, another five hundred did the same. In 1944, after surrendering to Allied troops, much of the Japanese population of Saipan completed suicide. Soldiers blew themselves up with grenades; civilians walked off cliffs or drowned themselves in the Pacific.
Collective suicide has also been occasioned by plague. “In the year of Grace 665,” wrote Roger of Wendover, a thirteenth-century monk and historian, “there was such an excessive mortality in England, that the people crowded to the seaside, and threw themselves from the cliffs into the sea, choosing rather to be cut off by a speedy death than to die by the lingering torments of the pestilence.” Seven centuries later the Black Death of 1348–50 spurred an even greater toll of suicides, including many Jews who, falsely accused of causing the plague by poisoning the wells, burned themselves to escape the gentiles’ fury. In A Journal of the Plague Year, his imaginative reconstruction of London’s Great Plague of 1665, Daniel Defoe wrote, “Some threw themselves out at windows or shot themselves, or otherwise made themselves away, and I saw several dismal objects of that kind.” An outbreak of smallpox among American Indians on the Central Plains during the 1830s set off an equally virulent outbreak of suicide. As one observer noted, “Very few of those who were attacked recovered their health; but when they saw all their relations buried, and the pestilence still raging with unabated fury among the remainder of their countrymen, life became a burden to them, and they put an end to their wretched existence, either with their knives and muskets, or by precipitating themselves from the summit of the rock near their settlement. The prairie all around is a vast field of death, covered with unburied corpses.”
Collective suicide often occurs in the face of an enemy less tangible than a disease or an army but no less real to its victims. In the mid-seventeenth century, the Old Believers, a Russian Orthodox sect that insisted the Antichrist was to arrive in 1666, burned their villages around them. In less than a decade some twenty thousand had taken their own lives. In Tiraspol, Russia, in 1897, twenty-eight members of a religious sect buried themselves alive to escape the census, which they regarded as sinful. In May 1910, when it was widely believed that the earth was about to pass through the tail of Halley’s comet, clusters of suicides were reported in Spain, France, and the United States. In 1978, under the spell of their charismatic leader, Jim Jones, who persuaded them that their way of life was threatened by a hostile outside world, 912 members of the People’s Temple drank cyanide-laced grape Kool-Aid at Jonestown, Guyana. Collective suicide has even been occasioned by ecstasy. During the dancing manias of the fourteenth century, hundreds of frenzied Italians and Germans tarantellaed off the cliffs.
In these instances a collection of individual impulses seems to detonate simultaneously, often under the influence of a leader who acts as a sort of lethal pied piper. At other times, a single suicide seems to set off a chain reaction in which the act of suicide is passed like a baton from despairing person to despairing person, often using the same method. In ancient Greece, Plutarch described such an episode:
A strange and terrible affliction once came upon the maidens of Miletos from some obscure cause—mostly it was conjectured that some poisonous and ecstatic temperament of the atmosphere produced in them a mental upset and frenzy. For there fell suddenly upon all of them a desire for death and a mad impulse towards hanging. Many hung themselves before they could be prevented. The words and tears of their parents and the persuasions of their friends had no effect. In spite of all the ingenuity and cleverness of those who watched them, they succeeded in making away with themselves.
The epidemic abated when city magistrates decreed that the corpses of suicides would henceforth be dragged naked through the marketplace, whereupon, as author A. Alvarez observed, “vanity, if not sanity, prevailed.” Similar rashes of suicide among women are said to have occurred in Marseille and Lyons during the Renaissance. In 1792, after a soldier hanged himself from a beam at Les Invalides hospital in Paris, five other wounded soldiers hanged themselves from the same beam within a fortnight, and a total of fifteen took their lives before the corridor was closed. After the suicides of two of his grenadiers at Saint-Cloud, Napoleon issued an order asserting that “to abandon oneself to grief without resisting, and to kill oneself in order to escape from it, is like abandoning the field of battle before being conquered.” (Napoleon himself had contemplated suicide as a melancholy teenager and is said to have attempted it by overdosing on opium after the death of his mistress, Josephine.) In 1928, in Budapest, after 150 drownings were recorded during the months of April and May, a “suicide flotilla” patrolled the Danube, saving nine of ten would-be suicides. Primitive tribes, recognizing the possibility of contagion, have devised more direct remedies. In African Homicide and Suicide, anthropologist Paul Bohannan writes, “The East African societies all destroy the tree on which or the hut in which the suicide occurred, burning it and the rope expressly so that an epidemic of suicides will not occur.”
Adolescents may be especially susceptible to imitation. “A child is more open to suggestion than an adult, in suicide as in all other matters,” observed David Oppenheim in 1910. “In fact, the power of suggestion shows itself with horrifying clarity in many youthful suicides.” Oppenheim, a professor of classical languages in Vienna, was speaking in Sigmund Freud’s living room at a meeting of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society. The meeting, perhaps the first interdisciplinary symposium on suicide, had been called in response to a crisis that bore remarkable similarity to the situation in the United States in 1984. An epidemic of adolescent suicide seemed to be sweeping Europe, Russia, and the United States around the turn of the century. In Moscow, to cite just one example, seventy children in a single school district took their lives between May 1908 and October 1910. The epidemic was widely reported in the press, and writers, doctors, and clergymen rounded up a familiar list of suspects: illegitimacy, divorce, excessive ambition, lack of discipline in the schools and in the home, and a general weakening of the moral fiber. “To all this may be added the weakmindedness which springs from forced, hothouse education, begun too early and goaded on too fast . . . ,” wrote one American critic. “Boys and girls to-day are often men and women in the experience of life and its excitements, and ennuyés or blasés at an age when their grandparents were flying kites and dressing dolls.”
Those words could have been written today, and the discussion that took place in Freud’s living room in 1910 was not unlike those heard at dozens of recent youth suicide symposiums. Freud’s distinguished panel talked about the social conditions that made suicide more likely, while noting that the focus must be on psychological vulnerability to stress rather than on the stress itself. They criticized journalists who oversimplified or sensationalized the problem, and raised concerns about the role of imitation. “The sensational fashion in which so many newspapers present such news [of a suicide],” observed Karl Molitor, “and the aura of martyrdom they delight in placing around these unfortunates, can all too easily induce another victim to follow the fatal example.” They called for better research and for suicide prevention education.
One issue raised in Freud’s living room that is increasingly debated today is the effect of music and literature on imitation. Certain books, videos, movies, and music are accused of acting as spurs to suicide. An oft-cited name on the list of rock musicians whose lyrics have been said to inspire suicide is Ozzy Osbourne. “Suicide is the only way out / Don’t you know what it’s really all about,” sang the heavy-metal star in “Suicide Solution,” from his album Speak of the Devil. The song was a favorite of John McCollum’s. A nineteen-year-old from Indio, California, one October night he went to his bedroom, put Speak of the Devil on the stereo, put on the headphones, and shot himself with his father’s pistol. His father filed suit against Osbourne and his record company, claiming that Osbourne’s “violent, morbid, and inflammatory music . . . encouraged John McCollum to take his own life.”
Each generation has its Ozzy Osbourne. Two hundred years ago it was Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, whose novel The Sorrows of Young Werther (published in 1774, when the author was twenty-four) is perhaps the most famous prod to youthful suicide in history. The hero is an angst-ridden young man who shoots himself when his love for a married woman goes unrequited. The book touched a nerve. Like Werther, young men all over Europe dressed in blue tailcoats and yellow waistcoats. Like Werther, they talked and acted with exaggerated sensitivity. And, like Werther, some of them shot themselves. Romantic suicidal melancholy was dubbed Wertherism, and those whose suicides were linked to the book were said to have been suffering from Wertheritis. Goethe biographer Richard Friedenthal writes, “One ‘new Werther’ shot himself with particular éclat: having carefully shaved, plaited his pigtail, put on fresh clothes, opened Werther at page 218 and laid it on the table, he opened the door, revolver in hand, to attract an audience and, having looked round to make sure they were paying sufficient attention, raised the weapon to his right eye and pulled the trigger.” The book was banned in Leipzig and Copenhagen; when an Italian translation appeared in Milan, the Catholic clergy bought up and destroyed the entire edition.
Goethe was not the only author whose works, according to some people, encouraged a preoccupation with death and suicide. In an 1805 sermon, “The Guilt, Folly, and Sources of Suicide,” New York City minister Samuel Miller asserted that “the mischievous influence on popular opinions produced by many dramatic representations and by licentious novels, may probably be considered as leading to many cases of the crime before us.” As the Romantic Age bloomed, Byron’s Manfred, Chateaubriand’s René, and Lamartine’s Raphael were all accused of sparking suicides and were duly reviled by the clergy. Even Thomas Paine’s 1796 treatise, The Age of Reason, was accused of sponsoring suicides by “weakening the moral principles.”
In 1928, when thirteen boys and girls killed themselves in thirteen weeks in the town of Liesva in the Ural Mountains, investigators from Moscow found they had been members of a suicide club formed in honor of Sergei Esenin, a Russian poet who had hanged himself in 1925. The students held meetings at which they discussed Esenin’s poetry and debated “Is life worth living?” and “Is suicide justified?” In 1936, in Budapest, the suicides of eighteen young people were linked to the popularity of a ballad called “Gloomy Sunday.” The lyrics of “The Hungarian Suicide Song,” as it came to be known, concluded with the words “My heart and I have decided to end it all.” (Thirty-two years later, Reszo Seress, the song’s composer, jumped to his death from his apartment window.) In the late forties, many adolescent suicides in the United States and Canada were attributed to the pernicious effects of horror comic books; in Montreal, policemen initiated a campaign to ban them from the newsstands. More recently, several films have been accused of romanticizing suicide and triggering the deaths of young people. The Deer Hunter, a film about the Vietnam War that contains a graphic depiction of Russian roulette, has been linked by researchers to at least forty-three Russian roulette deaths since its release in 1978. After the death by hanging of Robbie DeLaValliere, the first of the Westchester cluster, many people blamed the film An Officer and a Gentleman, in which a charismatic young naval cadet hangs himself. DeLaValliere had seen the film and had talked of it frequently before his death by hanging.
As Goethe himself noted, however, art reflects rather than creates the mood of a time. Robbie DeLaValliere was a troubled youngster long before he saw An Officer and a Gentleman. And John McCollum, the heavy-metal fan who killed himself while listening to “Suicide Solution,” had other problems besides Ozzy Osbourne. According to news reports, he had dropped out of school in the ninth grade and had “had some trouble with the law,” including an arrest for drunken driving. (His father’s suit against Osbourne was dismissed by a judge, who commented, “Trash can be given First Amendment protection, too.”) As one columnist observed, “We must grieve with Jack McCollum for the loss of his son. But there’s no reason to blame the artist who may have been his son’s only solace in a hostile and extremely unbearable world.” At a conference on youth suicide, a young woman in the audience voiced a similar point of view: “Maybe we should look at rock music not as a cause of problems but as a symptom of our time. Instead of condemning our youth we should start listening to them. And instead of banning their music we should start listening to it.”
Long before Plano and Westchester, media accounts of actual suicides were blamed for triggering further suicides. In 1828, English physician George Man Burrows wrote, “When the mind is beginning to aberrate, [it is] very essential to prevent persons affected by moral causes or inclined to suicide, from reading newspapers, lest the disposition and the mode be suggested by something similar.” While Burrows recommended that vulnerable people be kept from newspapers, William Farr, director of vital statistics for the British Registrar-General’s office, urged the press to control themselves. “No fact is better established in science than that suicide (and murder may perhaps be added) is often committed from imitation,” he wrote in 1841. “A single paragraph may suggest suicide to twenty persons; some particular, chance, but apt expression, seizes the imagination, and the disposition to repeat the act, in a moment of morbid excitement, proves irresistible. Do the advantages of publicity counterbalance the evils attendant on one such death? Why should cases of suicide be recorded at length in the public papers, any more than cases of fever?”
The debate reached its climax at the turn of the century. After the New York World published the article “Is Suicide a Sin?” in 1894, the New York Times accused the World of provoking an unprecedented number of suicides. A rash of Cleveland, Ohio, suicides in 1910 was attributed to press coverage, and in 1911 the National Association of Retail Druggists protested newspaper reports publishing the dosages of poisons used in suicide attempts as “inducing morbid people and criminals to use these poisons.” That same year, at the annual meeting of the American Academy of Medicine, statistician Edward Bunnell Phelps denounced “the pernicious influence of neurotic books and newspapers” as “an accomplice in crimes against the person.” He singled out morbid literature and plays, newspaper accounts of suicides, and lurid tales in the Sunday supplements—a “literary chamber of horrors” from which he culled a few examples: “The City of the Suicide Germ,” “Chain of Suicides Strangely Arise from Love Match,” and “The Pathetic Mystery of Suicide on the Eve of Marriage—What Secret Hides Behind the Recurring Tragedies of Self-Destruction at the Brink of Nuptial Union, Even Where Every Known Promise Is for a Happy Future.”
Did morbid literature and sensational newspaper accounts of suicide really increase the number of suicides? Or were the suicides that were blamed on the printed word the deaths of troubled people who would have killed themselves anyway? The sociologist Émile Durkheim believed the latter. In his landmark 1897 study, Le Suicide, he reviewed the research linking suicide and suggestion and concluded that the effect of imitation on the national level of suicides was minimal. Those few suicides that might be triggered by suggestion, he said, would eventually have occurred in any case; a book like Werther or a sensational newspaper report merely hastened the timing.
Seventy-seven years later, David Phillips, a thirty-year-old Princeton-trained sociologist, disputed this conclusion. Checking the vital statistics of the United States against the New York Times index for front-page stories on suicide since World War II, he found that suicides increase significantly in the month after a highly publicized suicide story. The greater the publicity, the greater the increase. For instance, the suicide of Marilyn Monroe in 1962 spurred a 12 percent jump (197 more suicides than would have been expected in the month following her death). Phillips also found that the increase occurs primarily in the geographic area in which the story is published. Finding that there was no matching “dip” in the rate after the publicity had died down, Phillips concluded that these deaths were “extra” suicides, not inevitable suicides that would otherwise have taken place a little later. Phillips called this phenomenon “the Werther effect.”
While his work offers compelling evidence linking suggestion and suicide, Phillips is careful to emphasize that the media story does not itself cause suicide. “The factors that drive a person to suicide may build up over many years,” he says. “I’ve been investigating only one aspect of it. I’m studying the trigger and not what loaded the gun.” Phillips goes on to speculate on how that trigger might be squeezed: “A suicide story in the newspaper may be a sort of natural advertisement. Just as, suppose, watching television, I have this strange vague feeling inside me, but I can’t put a label on it. Then I see an ad for McDonald’s, and I say to myself, ‘Come to think of it, I think that strange vague feeling I have is hunger. And there are various ways to assuage my hunger, but now I’ve seen this option suggested, I think I’ll go to McDonald’s.’
“Now it’s possible that unhappy people out there, who may or may not realize they’re unhappy, read the story about Marilyn Monroe’s suicide and become aware that they are unhappy and maybe also become aware of an option to end their unhappiness. They may feel they have been given permission because they see another person has done it. Maybe they say, ‘Gee, if even Marilyn Monroe is feeling bad enough to do this, shouldn’t I do it, too?’”
Over the years, numerous other studies have found evidence for the Werther effect. Researchers agree that the magnitude of the effect is related to the amount, duration, and prominence of the coverage; it is especially strong if the story is placed on the front page, with large headlines. Not surprisingly, it is more pronounced in those whose demographic characteristics—age, gender, nationality, and so on—resemble those of the victim. In nearly every study, however, teenagers have been shown to be especially susceptible.
The likability of the victim also makes a difference. The 1978 mass suicide at Jonestown, for instance, did not trigger a spike in the suicide rate. Similarly, news accounts of murder followed by suicide have had no effect, perhaps, researchers suggest, because of the “nonattractiveness” of the victims. After the highly publicized 1999 tragedy at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado, in which two teenage boys shot and killed twelve students and one teacher before killing themselves, one might have expected an increase in adolescent suicidal ideation. But an ongoing, yearlong CDC survey of high school students from fifty states allowed researchers to compare those who filled out the survey before Columbine with those who filled it out afterward. The percentage of students considering suicide decreased significantly following the tragedy, a result attributed by the survey’s authors to the nature of the media coverage. Although stories about the homicide victims focused on the outpouring of grief among their families and friends, stories about the suicide victims focused on the social problems they’d experienced at school.
While Phillips himself has provided evidence that the contagion effect extends to television news coverage of suicide, studies analyzing the effect of fictional television suicides have been less conclusive. But there is evidence to suspect that TV portrayals of self-destruction may lead to increased rates of suicide and suicide attempts, often using the same methods depicted in the shows. A 1999 English survey of patients presenting in forty-nine emergency rooms during the week following an episode of a popular TV series in which a teenager had overdosed on paracetamol found cases of self-poisoning up 17 percent. Twenty percent of the attempters said the broadcast had influenced their decision to take an overdose, while 17 percent said that the show had influenced their choice of drug. While the impact of film portrayals of suicide on the rate remains unproven, it is clear that the rate of cinematic suicide is rising. An examination of American films from 1917 to 1997 found that the portrayal of suicide in films has increased dramatically; nearly one in ten films now depicts a suicide or a suicide attempt. Whether this is a case of art imitating life or life imitating art is not yet apparent. (At least one study asks whether cyberspace—in the form of suicide-themed Web sites, where young people gather to discuss the subject and argue the merits of potential methods—may be fertile ground for the contagion effect.)
“If the mass media were to reduce the publicity of suicide stories, it’s pretty clear that the number of suicides would go down,” says Phillips, pointing out that several studies have documented a decrease in suicide deaths during newspaper strikes. Nevertheless, he opposes censorship. “I grew up in South Africa, where the press was controlled and individual freedom substantially limited. I think it would be extremely unfortunate if my studies were used as ammunition to pressure the media to change their coverage. If the media want to do this voluntarily, it’s up to them.” In 1987, following a highly publicized three-year rash of suicides by jumping in front of subway trains in Vienna, the Austrian Association for Suicide Prevention alerted journalists to the possible negative effects of excessive coverage and suggested alternative, less sensational strategies. When the amount of reporting on the deaths dropped, subway suicides and nonfatal attempts by that method fell more than 80 percent in the next six months, while the total number of Viennese suicides declined as well. In 1994, the CDC, acknowledging that “it is not news coverage of suicide per se, but certain types of news coverage, that promote contagion,” issued recommendations for the media. They urged journalists to avoid referring to suicide in the headline, to minimalize morbid details, to avoid publishing photographs of the death site or the funeral, to omit technical information about the suicide method, to avoid glorifying the victim with descriptions of grieving relatives and classmates, to avoid simplistic explanations (“Boy, 10, Kills Himself Over Bad Grades”), and to acknowledge that suicide is never caused by a single factor but by a complex interaction of many factors, usually involving a history of psychosocial problems.
Was anybody listening? Four years later, the Annenberg Public Policy Center reviewed a year’s worth of suicide coverage in nine of this country’s highest-circulation newspapers, as well as three years’ worth in the New York Times. Seven of the nine papers featured the word suicide in at least half their stories’ headlines, often in sensationalized fashion (“Eighth-Grade Sweethearts in a Love Suicide” was one 1995 New York Times headline). In 60 percent of the New York Times articles, either the fact of suicide or the method was mentioned in the headline, yet only 8 percent cited depression as a possible factor. Many of the stories included explicit details about the method used. It was hardly surprising that the newspapers had ignored the CDC guidelines; interviewing sixty-one reporters and fifteen editors who had reported on acts of suicide, the Annenberg Center found that the journalists had never heard of the guidelines. Some were unaware that certain types of coverage could increase copycat suicide, and even those who were familiar with the phenomenon expressed doubts about its validity.
On at least one occasion in this country, voluntary media restraint has had encouraging results. In 1994, when charismatic grunge rock star Kurt Cobain shot himself, experts expected a wave of copycat suicides. Rather than portraying Cobain as a misunderstood latter-day Werther, however, most news stories highlighted Cobain’s depression and substance abuse problems, while providing names and places to turn to if readers needed counseling. Cobain’s widow publicly and rather vituperatively expressed not only her grief but her anger at the senselessness of his death and at his abandonment of their nineteen-month-old daughter. A study published two years later found Cobain’s death had no effect on the adolescent suicide rate.
In 1984, however, the media could not restrain itself. Suicide and suicide clusters were a hot story. Ironically, the focus on clusters may allow us to overlook the extent of youth suicide generally. While spotlighting “affluent suburbs” such as Plano, for instance, the Dallas papers virtually ignored the fact that the teen suicide rate was far higher in their own city. And Westchester County alone would have a total of six teenage suicides in 1984, compared with an average of five over the previous eight years and fewer than the high of seven in 1979. In that case, the 1984 suicides barely qualified as an “epidemic,” which is defined as “more than would normally be expected,” leading some to suggest that the “Westchester cluster” was a statistical mirage.
On February 16, 1985, seventeen-year-old David Balogh of Tarrytown was found in a car parked at a landfill, dead from carbon monoxide poisoning. In the following three weeks there were three more adolescent suicides in Westchester County, the same number as in 1984 when the suicides had ignited media and public hysteria. “Last year at this time it was chaos,” a high school counselor told me. “This year there hasn’t been a peep. No calls from the media. Nobody mentions the word cluster.” Said a local psychologist, “I’d like to think it’s because the media is more sensitive to the issue, but the more cynical side of me wonders if it isn’t just old news.”
With or without media attention, adolescent suicides continued in the tricounty area. But gradually the suicides became just a part of the overall rate of adolescent suicide in the United States. Some people say, in fact, that the attention showered on the Westchester suicides of 1984 was, in fact, ultimately beneficial because it focused attention on the problem of adolescent suicide after many years of silence. “I think the way the media dealt with that particular episode had some very positive results,” Westchester pediatrician Kenneth Schonberg told me a few years later. “Despite the fact that, in all honesty, that was not a very exceptional year. Unfortunately, adolescents are dying at a rather constant rate from suicide, and it wasn’t restricted to the late winter and early spring of 1984. Eighty-four or eighty-three . . . which was it? I forget already.”