Citation

Pouliot L, Tousignant M. Can. Psychol. 2010; 51(2): 120-132.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2010, Canadian Psychological Association, Publisher University of Manitoba)

DOI

10.1037/a0019102

PMID

unavailable

Abstract

Suicide clusters are widely discussed and studied in the field of suicidology. Although, based on the shared assumption that they are real psychosocial phenomena, their status is rarely debated in the literature, while they may stand as simple statistical aberrations. Not all suicide clusters proceed under similar circumstances and outbreak pathways. Some of them seem to evolve from exposure to mass media portrayal and report of suicide. Others appear to arise under direct or indirect awareness to suicide of an intimate peer or acquaintance within a closed group. The position taken in this article is to assess to what extent these two phenomena and their common explanations stand empirically by reviewing evidences. Robustness of the empirical evidences is not optimum to state that suicide clusters are indeed real psychosocial phenomena and these proofs are not sufficiently reliable to reject the alternate hypothesis that they are occurring by chance alone. A more integrate conceptualization of the phenomena and methodological suggestions are offered in line to eventually reach a non equivocal answer about the validity of the phenomena. © 2010 Canadian Psychological Association.

Language: fr

Keywords

Suicide; Vulnerability; Suicide clusters; Imitation