The Impact of Suicide Stories on Human Behavior

After a suicide has made front page news, airplanes begin falling out of the sky at an alarming rate. The same social conditions that cause some people to commit suicide cause others to die accidentally. According to this social conditions interpretation, then some of the same societal factors that cause intentional deaths also cause accidental ones. This is why we find so strong a connection between suicide stories and fatal crashes. For example, it has been shown that immediately following certain kinds of highly publicized suicide stories, the number of people who die in commercial airline crashes increases by one thousand%. Even more alarming, the increase is not limited to airplane deaths. The number of automobile fatalities shoots up as well.