Suicide in the News, 2019–2026: Seasonality, Geography and Tone of Global Suicide Coverage, and How It Compares with Research and Invention
Year: 2026
Type: article
Abstract: We measure how suicide was covered in a global news index from January 2019 to July 2026, using 213,127 de-duplicated articles about suicide, and set that coverage beside 51,312 research papers (2015–2025) and 295 patent families (2015–2024). Six results stand out: Seasonality. On average 20.31% of each year's coverage appears in August and September, against 16.67% for an even spread. September holds the largest share (10.43%). Attention, not occurrence. Suicide took a 34.8% smaller share of news in 2021 than in 2019. Its share peaked in August 2019, at 34.24 articles per 10,000, and has stayed between 13.74 and 14.53 per 10,000 each year since 2022. Geography. India's share of located coverage (43.89%) is 3.32 times its share of all news. The United States (34.37%) is under-represented at 0.71. Asia is the only continent with clear over-representation (2.0). Within India, Rajasthan (2.12), Telangana (1.94) and Madhya Pradesh (1.74) lead; within the United States, New Mexico (1.96), Alaska (1.84) and Wyoming (1.8), once Utah and Montana, whose lift comes from place-name tagging errors, are set aside. Tone and urgency. 88.7% of articles are negative in tone (all news: 33.6%), and 93.1% are rated critical priority (all news: 42.6%). Measurement. 12.9% of raw matches for suicide vocabulary referred to suicide bombings, attack drones or figurative uses. Counting them would inflate coverage and mix in conflict reporting. Research and invention. Suicide papers grew from 5.34 to 9.01 per 10,000 papers between 2015 and 2025, a 1.69-fold rise in share. Patenting is small: 295 families in ten years, with China's office holding 37.8% of office filings.
Author: Kumar, Narendra
Language: English
Subfield: Clinical Psychology
Field: Psychology
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7222883144
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