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The article discusses the controversy surrounding the TV series "13 Reasons Why" and its potential impact on adolescent suicide rates. The series, which portrays the suicide of a teenage girl and the factors that led to it, received criticism from suicide prevention organizations for its potential to trigger contagion effects. Several studies have reported detrimental effects of the series on suicide rates, suicide attempts, self-harm presentations, and suicidal ideation among young people. The article responds to a critique of these studies, arguing that the critique did not provide valid evidence to cast doubt on the previous findings. The authors emphasize the need for entertainment media to follow best practices in suicide portrayals and raise awareness about their role in suicide prevention. [Extracted from the article]

Objective: The U.S. suicide rate has increased 35% since 1999. The role of the Internet has not been thoroughly investigated despite Internet use more than doubling from 1999 to present. The majority of U.S. suicide deaths are by firearm; however, there is no examination of the association between trends in firearm Internet searches and overall and firearm monthly suicide rates. We hypothesized that search strings related to firearm suicide would be significantly associated with monthly suicide rates (both all methods and firearm). Methods: Google Trends provides data on request frequencies of searches. Twenty‐four search strings were examined representing possible searches by individuals considering firearm suicide and compared to U.S. suicide rates with time‐series modeling. Results: In the time series with higher search volumes, consistent associations were found of negative cross‐correlation at lag +1. Conclusions: Several searches appeared at least sensitive enough to consistently show associations with overall and firearm suicide rates in the following month. This novel finding should be followed up as the potential exists to predict suicide trends. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Knowledge about suicide postvention ( KSPV) is an important distal outcome in the evaluation of suicide prevention programs that focus on the bereaved. However, most scales are specifically tailored to the evaluation study in question and psychometric properties are often unsatisfactory. Therefore, we developed the KSPV scale. Scale properties were investigated with Rasch trees, a newly developed method in the framework of item response theory. Additionally, we provide cues for convergent validity. In summary, the scale shows satisfactory properties for assessing KSPV and could be used to evaluate suicide postvention programs more effectively. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]