Schinckel.net

Boing Boing: LA train wreck: the copycat effect:

Coleman describes the “copycat effect” as “what happens when the media makes an event into a ‘hot death story’ and then via behavior contagion, more deaths, suicides, murders, and more occur in a regularly predictive cycle.”

South Australia actually has a pretty nice ‘code of conduct’ where media outlets (by-and-large) do not report on suicides in general, and youth suicides in particular, since there is a definite copycat effect. And then the Advertiser went and put front page images of when a student at a particular high school killed himself, at school.