Sunday, January 28, 2007

Freddie Prinze + 30

From my book, The Copycat Effect (Simon and Schuster, 2004):

"...highly publicized celebrity deaths, such as Freddie Prinze, who at 22, died by shooting himself in his head on January 28, 1977, produced higher rates among individuals who were about the same age, ethnicity, and gender as the famed suicides. After Prinze’s death, several young Latino males took their own lives using guns. These suicidological studies indicated that suicide stories were not and are not precipitating suicides that would have occurred anyway, but are actually creating additional suicides that would not have happened without the media accounts."

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