How Suicidal Tendencies Spread Through Families and Classrooms
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Much of the research on suicide prevention focuses on individual risk factors—but what about suicide as a social contagion? Professor Jason Fletcher and colleagues decided to examine the social processes related to suicide and found that it spreads through families, and spills over into classrooms—and, most intriguingly, that it moves along gender lines. This seems like terrible news, but discovering this mechanism actually has policy implications for suicide prevention: "Successful suicide prevention programs have this potential for spilling over on people who aren’t treated themselves or who aren’t intervened on themselves," Fletcher says. Preventing one suicide in a family can reduce the likelihood of an attempt for an adolescent within that family, but also for the adolescent’s classmates—that's a pretty astonishing finding. If you are in crisis, please call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-TALK (8255) or contact the Crisis Text Line by texting TALK to 741741, and to find support for yourself or a loved one, reach out to someone at The American Foundation for Suicide Prevention. This video was filmed as part of the Los Angeles Hope Festival, a collaboration between Big Think and Hope & Optimism.
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JASON FLETCHER:
Jason Fletcher is a Professor of Public Affairs with appointments in Sociology, Applied Economics and Population Health Sciences at University of Wisconsin-Madison.
A specialist in health economics, economics of education and child and adolescent health policy, Professor Fletcher focuses his research on examining social network effects on adolescent education and health outcomes, combining genetics and social science research, estimating long-term consequences of childhood mental illness, and child and adolescent mental health policy. He is an affiliate of the Center for Demography and Ecology, Institute for Research on Poverty, and Center for Demography on Health and Aging at the University and a Research Associate with the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) and Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA) and member of the Human Capital and Economic Opportunity Group at the University of Chicago.
He earned a B.S. in economics and public administration from the University of Tennessee–Knoxville (Summa Cum Laude) and his M.S. and Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin–Madison in Applied Economics. From 2010-2012, he was a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Health & Society Scholar at Columbia University. In 2012 he was selected for a career development award by the William T. Grant Foundation. That award is funding a study of the interplay between genetics and social settings in youth development. He currently is working on a project examining trends in educational mobility in the US sponsored by the Russell Sage Foundation and is a co-editor/managing editor of the Journal of Policy Analysis and Management.
Professor Fletcher's recent articles have appeared in the Review of Economics and Statistics, The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Journal of Policy Analysis and Management, Journal of Health Economics, and Demography. His book (with Dalton Conley)—The Genome Factor: What the Social Genomics Revolution Tells Us About Ourselves, Our History and Our Future—was published by Princeton University Press.
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TRANSCRIPT:
Jason Fletcher: So we focus attention on some of the behaviors on the very dark side of the spectrum of hopefulness and optimism, which is suicidal behaviors. When we dug into that literature, we saw the importance of suicide as a cause of death for young people, and for teenagers it’s the number two cause of death for, I think, ages 15 to 19 in the United States.
A lot of the scholarship that’s focused on suicide has focused on individual risk factors—both genetics and the presence of physical and emotional pain—and what we wanted to do is think a little bit broader about social contagion and social processes related to suicide. Processes of social contagion and suicide have also been understudied because social contagion and social processes for adolescent suicide often come up in the news when a celebrity commits suicide, and there are public policies for the media not to report celebrity suicides in order to not have spikes of adolescents committing suicide as copycatting. More rec...
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