Research report
One followed by many?—Long-term effects of a celebrity suicide on the number of suicidal acts on the German railway net

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jad.2012.08.032Get rights and content

Abstract

Background

Following the railway suicide of Robert Enke, a famous German football goal keeper, short-term copycat effects have been found. Main aims of the present study were to analyze long-term effects of this incidence and to compare them with overall national suicide data, as well as to investigate possible “anniversary effects”.

Methods

For long-term effects, the number of railway suicidal acts in the two years before and after Robert Enke's suicide (10th November 2009) were compared. For anniversary effects, the corresponding 2-week-periods in 2009, 2010 and 2011 were analyzed. Incidence ratios with 95% confidence intervals were computed.

Results

Compared to the two years before Enke's suicide the incidence ratio of the number of railway suicidal acts in the 2-year-period following this event increased by 18.8% (95% confidence interval (CI)=11.0–27.1%; p<0.001). The median number of suicidal acts per day increased from 2 to 3 (p<0.001). This effect remains significant after excluding short-term 2-week effects of Enke's suicide. An anniversary effect was not present. The increase of fatal railway suicides between 2007 and 2010 (25%) was significantly different from that for the total number of suicides in Germany (6.6%) (p<0.0001).

Limitations

Due to missing data, analyses regarding gender were limited and regarding age not feasible.

Conclusions

Long-term effects of Enke's suicide on railway suicidal acts in Germany in the sense of copycat behavior are probable as this increase cannot be explained by corresponding changes of the total number of suicides in Germany.

Introduction

Suicide is a leading cause of death throughout Europe and Germany. Data from the German Office for Statistics and Data Processing (Destatis, 2011) reveal that 10.021 people died by committing suicide in Germany in 2010, 766 (7.6%) of those through “intentional self-harm by jumping or lying in front of a moving object” (X81, ICD-10; World Health Organization, 1992). From 1991 to 2000 railway suicides accounted for approximately 7% of all suicides in Germany according to data from the national central registry of all passenger accidents on the railway net in Germany (Baumert et al., 2006) and an average of 18 cases per week on the German railway net was reported for the time span of 1997–2002 (Erazo et al., 2004). Given the high lethality of the method (Erazo et al., 2005), its preference by psychiatric inpatients (Huisman et al., 2010) as well as the impact on train drivers (Tranah and Farmer, 1994, Farmer et al., 1992) and other affected persons, more research is needed on this particular suicide method and related factors. Such factors include the effect on the development of case numbers by celebrity railway suicides and the media reporting following such incidents. Knowledge about specific characteristics of suicidal acts on the railway net will be crucial for the development of future preventive measurements.

The general effect of an increase in suicide numbers triggered by (extensive) media reporting on suicide cases, in the literature described as “Werther-effect” (Phillips, 1974; for review of the corresponding studies: Ziegler and Hegerl, 2002, Pirkis et al., 2006), has been widely discussed. Although it does not seem to apply for all cases of celebrity suicides followed by media reporting (e.g., Jobes et al., 1996), evidence for media-induced subsequent imitation effects of suicidal behaviour is growing. Copycat behaviour seems to be most elaborated in persons similar to the respective model regarding gender and suicide method (Niederkrotenthaler et al., 2009, Fu and Yip, 2009). It has been observed for different methods such as charcoal burning (Chen et al., 2012), hanging (Cheng et al., 2007, Tousignant et al., 2005) or jumping (Yip et al., 2006) as well as for real events (e.g., Chen et al., 2012) and fictional cases (e.g., Schmidtke and Häfner, 1988). Schmidtke and Häfner described a Werther effect following the broadcast of a fictional six-episode weekly serial showing the railway suicide of a 19-year-old male. Kunrath et al. (2011) found the significant rise of 44% of the number of railway suicides per day in an index period after a fatal railway accident, in which three members of a professional team were killed investigating a previous fatal incident on a train track that was referred to as a possible suicide by some media reports. An even more pronounced development of a percentage change of 81% in the index period was observed following the real case of Robert Enke (Ladwig et al., 2012). This famous and admired German national goalkeeper committed suicide on the railway net on Nov. 10, 2009. An association in between those figures and the media reporting about this case can be assumed. The media attention was outstanding and long-lasting, including a television broadcast of a public mourning ceremony hold in the stadium of the goalkeeper's team viewed by almost 7 million German television viewers.

Presumptions about the time span in which media reports about fatal suicidal acts are potentially followed by copycat behaviour are diverse. While the effect seems to be greatest three days after the incident (Cheng et al., 2011), in the case of Robert Enke it lasted throughout four weeks (Ladwig et al., 2012). Little is known about the influence on time-spans exceeding this period.

The present study has two main objectives: First, it aims at investigating whether the suicide death of Robert Enke had a long-term influence on the number of suicidal acts on the German railway net in the two years period following the fatal event. Gender specific analyses will be conducted and changes in railway suicidal acts will be put into relationship to changes in overall suicide rates as well as unemployment rates in Germany.

Second, the presence of a possible “anniversary effect” in 2010 and 2011 is investigated.

Section snippets

Database

Our analyses are based on data stemming from the “Deutsche Bahn Event Database Safety (EDS)”. This database of the German railway infrastructure covers all person accidents related to the national German railway track system with a total length of 33723 km in 2010, excluding municipal subway providers. The data concerning the daily frequency of fatal as well as non-fatal suicidal acts on the railway track system in Germany were analyzed within this study.

Data for the comparison of railway

Did long-term effects of Enke's suicide on railway suicidal acts in Germany occur?

In the two-year interval before Enke's suicide (10/11/2007 to 09/11/2009), 1681 railway suicidal acts were registered, in contrast to 1997 railway suicidal acts in the two-year period after this event (11/11/2009 to 11/11/2011) (see Table 1). This corresponds to a significant increase of 316 suicidal acts (+18.8%; 95% CI: 11.0–27.1%; p<0.001) in the index time interval.

In line with this finding, the mean number of railway suicidal acts per day during the two-year interval before Enke's suicide

Discussion

Our results show that the railway suicide of the German football goal-keeper Robert Enke was not only followed by a more than doubling of the number of railway suicidal acts in the following two weeks, but also by an increase of railway suicidal acts by 19% in the following two years, as compared to the two years before this tragic event. The former finding is in line with the main result of the study by Ladwig et al. (2012) who found an overall percentage increase of 117.2% when comparing the

Conflicts of Interest

None.

Contributors

Ulrich Hegerl, Christine Rummel-Kluge, Christian Gravert and Martin Walden made substantial contributions to conception and design of the study, interpreted the data, revised the manuscript critically for important intellectual content and performed final approval of the submitted version of the manuscript. Roland Mergl performed the statistical analysis of the data. Nicole Koburger and Roland Mergl wrote together the first draft of the manuscript and managed the literature searches. They made

Role of funding source

The study was not supported by a funding institution.

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank Holger Senzel from DB Bahn Safety for his support regarding the databank for railway suicidal acts.

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