Chapter One: Beyond The Sorrows of Young Werther

From the blood which flowed from the chair, it could be inferred that he had committed the rash act sitting at his bureau, and that he afterwards fell upon the floor. He was found lying on his back near the window. He was in full-dress costume.

—Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, The Sorrows of Young Werther

A pattern underlies many of the events we hear about in the news every day. But the pattern is not openly discussed on your cable news network, over your twenty-four-hour news radio station, or in your newspaper. It is either overlooked or ignored.

The pattern is called the "copycat effect." It is also known as "imitation" or the "contagion effect." And what it deals with is the power of the mass communication and culture to create an epidemic of similar behaviors.

The copycat effect is the dirty little secret of the media. That doesn't prevent the media from calling the various epidemics of similar behaviors the "copycat phenomenon," often for shock impact. But, curiously, their use of the phrase seems to put a distance between the events and the reporting media, and allows them the stance that implies they are not part of the problem. But they are.

Sociologists studying the media and the cultural contagion of suicidal behaviors were the first to recognize the copycat effect. In 1974, University of California at San Diego sociologist David P. Phillips coined the phrase Werther effect to describe the copycat phenomenon. The name Werther comes from the 1774 novel The Sorrows of Young Werther by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, the author of Faust. In the story, the youthful character Werther falls in love with a woman who is promised to another. Always melodramatic, Werther decides that his life cannot go on and that his love is lost. He then dresses in boots, a blue coat, and a yellow vest, sits at his desk with an open book, and, literally at the eleventh hour, shoots himself. In the years that followed, throughout Europe, so many young men shot themselves while dressed as Werther and seated at their writing desks with an open copy of The Sorrows of Young Werther in front of them that the book was banned in Italy, Germany, and Denmark.

Though an awareness of this phenomenon has been around for centuries, Phillips was the first to conduct formal studies suggesting that the Werther effect was, indeed, a reality—that massive media attention and the retelling of the specific details of a suicide (or, in some cases, untimely deaths) could increase the number of suicides.

The August 1962 suicide of Marilyn Monroe presents a classic modern-day example of the Werther effect. In the month that followed it, 197 individual suicides—mostly of young blond women—appear to have used the Hollywood star's suicide as a model for their own. The overall suicide rate in the U.S. increased by 12 percent for the month after the news of Monroe's suicide. But, as Phillips and others discovered, there was no corresponding decrease in suicides after the increase from the Marilyn Monroe–effect suicides. In other words, the star's suicide actually appeared to have caused a whole population of vulnerable individuals to complete their own deaths, over and above what would be normally expected. This is the copycat effect working with a vengeance.

Before the appearance of the Internet and cable news, the significance of stories in newspapers, on the radio, and via broadcast television news could be tracked rather well. In a 1979 study on imitation and suggestion, Phillips found an increase in the rate of automobile fatalities immediately after publicized suicides. The more publicity the suicide story received, the higher the automobile fatality rate. As might be expected, the motor vehicle fatalities were most frequent in the region where the suicide story was publicized. More surprising was the fact that younger people dying in vehicle crashes tended to follow reports of younger suicide victims, while older people dying in vehicle crashes tended to follow reports of older suicide victims. This was a striking example of peer group imitation, modeling, and suggestion.

Phillips also managed to get a handle on how long the effect lasts. In examining a two-week period beginning two days prior to the publicized suicide and ending eleven days later, he found that automobile fatalities increased by 31 percent in the three-day period after a suicide was reported in the media. The increase appears to have a lesser seven-day mirror peak as well. As we will see, this "effects period" finding extends to other types of contagious behavior, not just suicides.

Phillips is quite certain that no other variables are involved in the increase in suicides. "The increase in the suicide rate was not due to the effect of weekday or monthly fluctuations in motor vehicle fatalities, to holiday weekends, or to yearly linear trends," he reported, as his study had taken these other time variables into consideration.

I became interested in the Werther effect as a university-based public policy researcher and author in the 1980s, following an explosion of copycat teen suicides throughout America at that time. In 1987, I wrote the first book on that situation, Suicide Clusters, to heighten awareness of the situation at a time when professionals and the media would hardly acknowledge the problem even existed. The book was dedicated to David Phillips for his groundbreaking work, which had been largely ignored by most scholars up to that time.

Copyright © 2004 by Loren Coleman