Letter to the Editor Re: Romer D. Seasonal suicide trends in adolescents in the United States: Did they explain the apparent effect of the Netflix show 13 Reasons Why?

In late March 2017, Netflix released Season 1 of the TV series 13 Reasons Why (13RW) globally and sparked immediate criticism from suicide prevention organizations due to the potential risk of the series to trigger contagion effects (Arendt et al., 2017). The series' main character, 17-year-old Hannah Baker, experiences many stressors typical of adolescent age (e.g., mistreatment by her peers, conflicts with school staff, etc.). The series opens with Hannah telling viewers that she had died by suicide. Viewers are then taken back in time and learn of the various stressors that contributed to Hannah's suicidality, all of which are related to her social environment. Hannah tries to seek help several times but her help-seeking is portrayed as counterproductive and as part of the problem, leaving her even more hopeless and betrayed. Notably, the series also omits any portrayal of suicide as arising from a treatable mental illness. All this precedes a very graphic portrayal of her suicide (Reidenberg et al., 2020). The suicide scene was later cut out by Netflix (Voelker, 2019) due to continuing criticism and several studies suggesting negative effects on adolescent suicides (Bridge et al., 2019; Niederkrotenthaler et al., 2019; Sinyor et al., 2019).