Another Union Square suicide--coincidence or contagion?

I got home from the office today to find news of another Union Square suicide, this time in San Francisco. As you can see from the above SFist comments thread, the connection was quickly noted--indeed, someone commented on my Flickr set they initially thought it was from SF.

In all likelihood the second death was a coincidence, not inspired by its New York counterpart. For one thing, as of the time of the San Francisco suicide, reports of the New York event had not hit the national news.

The reporting of suicide raises complex ethical questions. One issue is perhaps best known through Robert Cialdini's classic Influence: namely, the possibility that suicide is contagious.

It's not an unlikely hypothesis. Mimesis is hard-wired in the mind; it is arguably the key factor in the emergence of humanity. But it also seems to have a dark side. Philosopher Rene Girard has written extensively on the role that mimetic desire plays in social conflict, as imitation among competitors leads to mimetic aggression. Similar, it has been argued that reports of a suicide spark imitative self-destruction, as the report of the act validates suicide as an adaptive behavior.

The possibility that the suicide is mimetic has given rise to at least two competing lines of thought re the ethics of reporting suicide. One approach holds that we need to limit access of information about suicide, so as to reduce the possibility that the act will go viral. Supporting this approach: statistical studies that seem to confirm that suicides tend to occur in clusters.

Others adopt a somewhat revisionist point of view, arguing that a more nuanced analysis of the statistics does not actually support the mimetic hypothesis, at least in every case. Among the proponents of this argument, surprisingly enough, has been the Center for Disease Control, which cites a Texas study observing that news of suicide might actually decrease the risk of suicidal behavior.

How can that be, given our innate mimetic impulse? One key factor may be the way the news is presented. In short, the more it comes across as maladaptive or reductionistic--less than beneficial, less than human--the greater the likelihood that suicide will seem unattractive. In this regard, consider jokes about suicide or, say, driver ed films that associate mangled bodies in car accidents with funny music; rather than being tasteless, they might actually be embedded strategies for survival, neutralizing negative mimetic behavior by making reckless or self-destructive acts seem absurd.