Suicides in Australia following media reports of the death of Robin Williams
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Objective: This study assessed the extent to which local reporting of Robin Williams’ suicide (on 11 August 2014) was associated with suicide in Australia. It followed several studies in the United States which showed that there were significant increases in suicide following media reports of Williams’ death and that those media reports were less than optimal in terms of adherence to best-practice guidelines. In a previous study, we demonstrated that Australian media reports of Williams’ suicide were largely adherent with our Mindframe guidelines on responsible reporting of suicide, so we speculated that there would be no increase in suicide following the reporting of Williams’ suicide in Australia. Method: We extracted data on Australian suicides from the National Coroners Information System for the period 2001 to 2016. We conducted interrupted time series regression analyses to determine whether there were changes in suicides in the 5-month period immediately following Williams’ suicide. Results: Our hypothesis that there would be no increase in suicides in Australia following Williams’ highly publicised suicide was not supported. There was an 11% increase in suicides in the 5-month period following Williams’ death, largely accounted for by men aged 30–64 and by people who died by hanging (the method Williams used). Conclusion: It may be that Australians were exposed to reports that contravened safe reporting recommendations, particularly via overseas media or social media, and/or that some Australian reports may have had unhelpful overarching narratives, despite largely adhering to the Mindframe guidelines. The Mindframe guidelines constitute international best practice but consideration should be given to whether certain recommendations within them should be further reinforced and whether more nuanced information about how stories should be framed could be provided. Future revision and augmentation of the Mindframe guidelines should, as always, involve media professionals.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".