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

Abstract

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.

Proceedings of the Fourth Workshop on Computational Linguistics and Clinical Psychology –- From Linguistic Signal to Clinical Reality

“…Quantifiable signals for a wide range of behavioral health conditions have been uncovered recently, and this provides a foothold into analysis and intervention empowered by data science. A wide array of conditions have been studied including major depressive disorder (Chung and Pennebaker, 2007;, post-traumatic stress disorder (Coppersmith et al, 2014b(Coppersmith et al, , 2015bResnik et al, 2015;Preotiuc-Pietro et al, 2015;Pedersen, 2015), schizophrenia , eating disorders (Walker et al, 2015;Chancellor et al, 2016), generalized anxiety disorder, bipolar disorder (Coppersmith et al, 2014a), suicide (Coppersmith et al, 2015c;Kumar et al, 2015;Kiciman et al, 2016), borderline personality disorder, and others (Coppersmith et al, 2015a).…”

“…They also found that users use the platform not only for self-expression, but also for seeking diagnosis and treatment information for their conditions. Kumar et al (2015) studied the r/SuicideWatch community on Reddit after celebrity suicides and found increased posting activity and increased suicidal ideation in post content, by using linguistic measures, N -gram comparison, and topic modeling.…”

Latent sentiment topic modelling and nonparametric discovery of online mental health-related communities

“…To understand aspects of online mental health-related communities including online depression and autism communities, several research has been done for identifying characteristics of these communities [29,44,46,47,[49][50][51]. With questionnaire-based methods, existing studies (e.g.…”

“…It offers a wide scope of features ranging from linguistics, stylistics, social, affective, cognitive, perceptual, biological, relativity, personal concerns, to spoken features. These features were found to be good indicators of depression and mental health [12,14,29,47]. Based on LIWC features (also called psycholinguistic features), existing studies on community detection (e.g.…”

Exploratory Analysis of Social Media Prior to a Suicide Attempt

“…Post traumatic stress and schizophrenia are two examples of conditions significantly rarer than depression, whose analysis are possible by these techniques (Coppersmith et al, 2014b;. Suicide and suicidal ideation were more difficult to obtain data for, but some population-level analysis was enabled by anonymous suicide help fora (Kumar et al, 2015;Kiciman et al, 2016). Additionally, Robertson et al (2012) investigated the role that social media has in suicide clusters (among people in disparate geographies connected online).…”