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A copycat suicide is defined as an emulation of another suicide that the person attempting suicide knows about either from local knowledge or due to accounts or depictions of the original suicide on television and in other media. A spike of emulation suicides after a widely publicized suicide is known as the Werther effect, following Goethe's novel ''The Sorrows of Young Werther''. The well-known suicide serves as a model, in the absence of protective factors, for the next suicide. This is referred to as suicide contagion. They occasionally spread through a school system, through a community, or in terms of a celebrity suicide wave, nationally. This is called a suicide cluster.〔 Suicide clusters are caused by the social learning of suicide related behaviors, or "copycat suicides". Point clusters are clusters of suicides in both time and space, and have been linked to direct social learning from nearby individuals. Mass clusters are clusters of suicides in time but not space, and have been linked to the broadcasting of information concerning celebrity suicides via the mass media Examples of celebrities whose suicides have inspired suicide clusters include Ruan Lingyu, the Japanese musicians Yukiko Okada and hide, and Marilyn Monroe, whose death was followed by an increase of 200 more suicides than average for that August month.〔 Another famous case is the self-immolation of Mohamed Bouazizi, a Tunisian street vendor who set himself on fire on December 17, 2010, an act that was a catalyst for the Tunisian Revolution and sparked the Arab Spring, including several men who emulated Bouazizi's act. To prevent this type of suicide, it is customary in some countries for the media to discourage suicide reports except in special cases. ==History== One of the earliest known associations between the media and suicide arose from Goethe's novel ''Die Leiden des jungen Werthers'' (''The Sorrows of Young Werther''). Soon after its publication in 1774, young men began to mimic the main character by dressing in yellow pants and blue jackets. In the novel, Werther shoots himself with a pistol after he is rejected by the woman he loves, and shortly after its publication there were many reports of young men using the same method to kill themselves in an act of hopelessness. This resulted in the book being banned in several places. Hence the term "Werther effect", used in the technical literature to designate copycat suicides. The term was coined by researcher David Phillips in 1974. Two centuries after Goethe's novel was published, David Phillips confirmed imitative suicides as the "Werther effect." Reports in 1985 and 1989 by Phillips and his colleagues found that suicides and other accidents seem to incline after a well publicized suicide.〔 Copycat suicide is mostly blamed on the media. "Hearing about a suicide seems to make those who are vulnerable feel they have permission to do it," Phillips said. He cited studies that showed that people were more likely to engage in dangerous deviant behavior, such as drug taking, if someone else had set the example first.〔 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Copycat suicide」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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