Searches for the phrase "how to commit suicide," for example, were 26% higher than would have been expected, while the phrases "commit suicide" and "how to kill yourself" were 18% and 9% higher, respectively.
Viewers also appeared to be searching for information about suicide prevention, but the trending searches with the sharpest uptick were about suicidal ideation, or thoughts about how to kill oneself. Because of course continues to be a character - she's in scenes and she's still there in many ways," Don Mordecai, Kaiser Permanente's national leader for mental health, told Business Insider.Īnother more disturbing study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association on the heels of the show's premiere found evidence that some viewers went online after watching and typed phrases like "how to kill yourself" in Google search. "There was a kind of romanticization, and at the core of the story was this idea that you can kill yourself and be dead and yet not really be dead. A far bigger issue is the way Baker is given authority, power, and essentially a second life after her death. In the season finale, viewers watch Baker take her own life in slow, graphic, and horrifying detail - which directly contradicts guidelines from mental health experts about how to depict suicide in a way that doesn't encourage others to follow suit.īut that portrayal of suicide was not the producers' only dangerous mistake, experts say. Viewers learn of this through a series of 13 tapes that Baker records before her death.
The show's first 13 episodes trace the tragically short life of a young high school student named Hannah Baker who is assaulted, raped, and witness to a friend's rape.