Do suicides from the Golden Gate Bridge cluster?

Suicides from popular venues (known as “hotspots”) are often publicized and may result in imitation by subsequent suicides that may lead to clustering of the suicides over time. In order to examine whether the suicides from the Golden Gate Bridge showed clustering, data from the 224 suicides during 1999–2009 were analyzed using the Anderson-Darling Test was run on the data against a null hypothesis of a negative exponential distribution (as would be generated by a homogenous Poisson process). It was found that the data were almost a perfect fit for the Poisson distribution and so showed no evidence of clustering beyond that expected to occur by chance alone. This indicates that there was no imitation or contagion in the suicides from the Golden Gate Bridge.

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