What the highest rated movie of all time may teach us about portraying suicide in film

I guess it comes down to a simple choice, really. Get busy living or get busy dying. – Andy, The Shawshank Redemption

Media portrayals of suicide can have a substantial, negative influence on suicide rates often described as the Werther effect (Sinyor et al., 2018). One of the most extreme examples of this phenomenon was the publicity surrounding the death of Robin Williams which was associated with an increase of more than 1800 deaths in the United States in late 2014 (Fink et al., 2018). Recently, there has been renewed interest in the potential deleterious effects of fictional media depictions given an association between the release of the Netflix show 13 Reasons Why and increased youth suicides (Niederkrotenthaler et al., 2019).