MedPage Today (5/29, Hlavinka) reports, “Suicides increased among young people following the March 2017 release of 13 Reasons Why, the Netflix series exploring a fictional 17-year-old girl’s suicide, and were associated at least temporally with social media activity surrounding the show,” researchers concluded after gathering “1,416,175 tweets from 870,056 users and 26,322 Instagram posts from 7,875 influencers, who each had at least 15,000 followers,” then examining “monthly suicide data from the CDC’s Wide-ranging Online Data for Epidemiologic Research (WONDER) system from 1999 to 2017.” The findings were published online May 29 in JAMA Psychiatry. The authors of an accompanying editorial observed the study’s “findings still provide ‘compelling evidence’ that the uptick of suicides was related to the series.”
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