Piece Of Art

It has been a busy week. Here's some items that have come to my attention in recent days. NYU's balconies On March 29, New York University's student paper, the Washington Square News broke the news that NYU was going to be closing all the balconies at two more dorms on campus to discourage jumping suicides. On March 30, the rest of the New York media - New York Times , Newsday , New York Post - picked up the story. Following two suicide leaps from the atrium of the Bobst Library, and after the series reached five recent NYU jumping suicides, the copycat effect certainly was occurring. NYU consulted with many specialists, including calling and talking to me, reading my book, and then decided to limit access to the lethal means, the dorm balconies. As one news source noted, it is no different that building a fence to prevent suicide off the Golden Gate Bridge. In answer to the students' and other critics who quickly said: "Well, if people want to kill themsel...

Predicting when the Red Lake school shooting would occur this year was relatively easy when one becomes attuned to the copycat effect. So, now, when should we look for the next round of shootings? And can educators and law enforcement professionals do anything to be on the lookout and prevent them? First of all, I do sense the wall-to-wall coverage of the Red Lake shooting may trigger vulnerable suicidal boys with guns who over-identify with Jeff Weise. Will the next one be another neo-Nazi who uses a gun or someone that hates their math class? I'm not a psychic but all the incidators are that a suicidal youth who "wants to take some people with him" could repeat this awful tragedy in the next month. There is a three/four-day, seven-day, and one-month media cycle that are behind these copycats. So, if we get through next Monday, we might get beyond this current short-term window. But then in a month, we are going to be entering an extremely dangerous time. The whole...

An Open Letter to the Rocky Mountain News Editors: Unfortunately, concerning the phenomenon of school shootings, the Rocky Mountain News' "Experts Debunk Notion of Copycats " is a dangerous treatment of a serious subject and hardly a comprehensive survey of "experts." I count two Colorado individuals, one a lecturer in sociology and the other an assistant director at a research center as attempting to overturn over forty years of well-documented rigorous studies of behavior contagion and the copycat effect. In my book, The Copycat Effect, I use over 300 pages and 400 references to show the extent of this research and the findings. Copycat suicide waves after the suicides of famous people are known as the “Werther Effect,” from a 17th century suicide fad among young Europeans who had read Goethe’s “The Sorrows of Young Werther,” whose protagonist shoots himself with a pistol. Historically, "experts" such as Karl Menninger, Sigmund Freud, and Emile Du...

After predicting on March 18th (see in this blog below) that we should expect a school shooting in the March 20-April 20 period, and seeing it come to pass, my hope is people are becoming more alert to what is unfolding here. I also was correct in noting in my book the warning signs we should be aware of in the shooter (neo-Nazi, male, use of guns, twilight language, suicidal). Perhaps we should even reexamine the overlooked focus on math classes in these shootings, from Moses Lake (1996) to Red Lake (2005). We must watch out for the full impact of the copycat effect from the Minnesota incident. Already, more "hit list" stories are in the media today http://pressherald.mainetoday.com/news/state/050323noble.shtml /">at a high school in Noble, Maine, at a high school in Biloxi, Mississippi, and at an elementary school in Shelby County, Kentucky. American and international school shootings could follow in the near future, if the pre-9/11 pattern returns. Furtherm...

The Korean media is alerting us to a new wave of copycat suicides in the wake of a celebrity suicide, "Lee Eun-ju Sparks Copycat Suicide Craze." Actress Lee Eun-ju hanged herself on February 22nd. The article mentioned: "The Seoul Central Prosecutors Office said analysis of deaths in seven Seoul districts" from January through March 17th, "revealed that there were 2.13 suicides a day in the 23-day period after Lee’s suicide. This was 2.5 times the daily average of 0.84 during the 53-day period before Lee’s suicide." "A woman in her 20s who hung herself in her room on the morning of March 1 told people around her that she had found a way to free herself from debt after learning of actress Lee Eun-ju’s suicide, police said." Hanging had moved from 53% of the suicides to 80% of the deaths, with 14 of the 15 individuals in their 20s using the method of hanging. Clearly, behavior contagion and modeling are occurring in Korea. The article mentions the...

Sadly, the school shooting was no surprise to the readers of this blog, of last Friday, March 18th. "...a possible series of school shootings from March 20th through April 20th could occur...I hope not, but every indication is that the media is entering its first post-9/11 'shooting rampage' feeding frenzy, and as March nears its end, and into April, 'school shootings' could be next." I based this from an analysis of how the Werther (copycat) effect from other events (mall shootings, murder-suicides, courthouse shootings) spill over into school shootings, and the anniversary reality of the calendar. In my book, The Copycat Effect (NY: Simon and Schuster, 2004), I point out the youthful suicidal "school shooting" subculture uses the neo-Nazi calendar as a temporal roadmap. Columbine's and Erfurt, Germany's school shootings are the two most obvious examples. This morning's Steve Karnowski-authored Associated Press story from Minnesota gi...

The following is a summary of the multiple death "rampages" that have attracted wide media dissemination so far in 2005. Several of these are murder-suicide situations. The fingerprints of the copycat effect are all over these events - courthouses, judges, and then spillovers to other mass shootings. March 12, 2005 - Total of eight dead, shooter kills self Seven were shoot and killed, before the 45-year-old turned the gun on himself, at the Sheraton Hotel in Brookfield, Wisconsin, west of Milwaukee, during a regular service of the Living Church of God. The church is an offshoot of the Worldwide Church of God which was founded by American evangelist Herbert W. Armstrong in 1933. March 11, 2005 - Total of four dead, shooter gives up to police. A judge presiding over a rape trial, his court reporter and a sheriff's deputy are shot to death at the Fulton County Courthouse in Atlanta. The next morning, a US Customs agent is killed. Authorities say the suspect overpowered a...