Steven Stack, director of the Center for Suicide Research in Troy, Mich., cautions against reading too much into either study. Several years later, two Australian researchers published their own study showing that the suicide rate for young people in Australia was lower in the 30-day period following Cobain's death in 1994 than during the same time span in 1992 or 1993. "But it memorialized his work and the sadness people felt about losing such a gifted artist." "I felt like it didn't glorify the way he died," Jobes said. Jobes also points to the public memorial that took place in Seattle on April 10, where a newly widowed Courtney Love arrived holding Cobain's suicide note. It was the first widespread use…of warnings signs and hotline numbers and things that now are sort of matter-of-fact." "It was the first time in my memory that the journalists who were covering a very high-profile celebrity suicide really did what the research community wanted them to do all along. "It was a proud moment for the media," Jobes said. They were put into practice in April 1994 on a scale no one could have predicted. That meant suicide-prevention resources and help numbers appearing for the first time alongside news reports. Just the prior year, the medical community issued guidelines on covering suicide to the media. But the media's handling of Cobain's death marked the most lasting shift. In Here We Are Now, Cross explores each element in depth. In it, Jobes hypothesizes several factors behind the decrease: positive aspects of the media coverage, outreach efforts by crisis centers and other area experts, and Cobain's method of choice, which would seem especially violent, even to a person at risk. Jobes's study, which he co-authored and published in Suicide and Life-Threatening Behavior in 1996, went against the grain of prior research on celebrity suicides. The lead singer of Nirvana Kurt Cobain in 1993. "It doesn't make his death any less of a tragedy, but in some ways there is good that even comes out of that horrible piece of fate." "I think Kurt's story ends up being a very useful cautionary tale when it comes to public health issues," Cross told Newsweek. "We were truly stunned by what we didn't find," he added.Ĭross says that revelation prompted him to write the book after having already written a definitive biography of the singer. "And we had a marked and dramatic increase in calls to the crisis center." "When we looked at the completions before and after Cobain's death and used the previous years and the following years, we actually saw a drop-off," Jobes said. But what experts had dreaded and taken as a given never materialized. There were several deaths treated as copycat suicides.
#LEAD SINGER OF TEEN SUICIDE BAND SERIES#
That week he contacted the King County Medical Examiner's Office in order to perform an interrupted time series analysis-a look at the data before and after a significantly impactful event. It was Jobes who first looked at the data. Largely the opposite did.Īs Cobain biographer Charles Cross traces in a new book, Here We Are Now: The Lasting Impact of Kurt Cobain, the suicide rate in the Seattle region (and in some places as far away as Australia) actually decreased in the weeks following Cobain's death. The national suicide rate rose by more than 10 percent the month after Marilyn Monroe died-and that was before 24/7 media coverage.īut that's not what happened in 1994. Everything Jobes had studied suggested that there would be an epidemic of copycat suicides in the Seattle region and beyond, given the artist's massive cultural reach. Shock at the news of the Nirvana frontman's death quickly gave way to alarm. "We were having breakfast, and the lead story was on Kurt Cobain's suicide." "Literally, I was at a suicide-prevention conference with some guys from the Centers for Disease Control ," Jobes, a professor of psychology at the Catholic University of America, recalled this week. Jobes was sitting in a hotel dining room surrounded by fellow suicide researchers when news of the highest-profile suicide in decades flashed across a screen.
0 kommentar(er)
