Steven Stack

Wayne State University | WSU · Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Neurosciences & Department of Criminology

Suicide and other self-directed violence deaths are likely grossly underestimated, reflecting inappropriate classification of many drug intoxication deaths as accidents or unintentional and heterogeneous ascertainment and coding practices across states. As the tide of prescription and illicit drug-poisoning deaths is rising, public health and resea...

Objective: CDC has called for suicide research on the construction industry, an industry with a high suicide rate. The present study addresses this gap and focuses on roofers. It assesses which risk factors distinguish suicides by roofers from those of the general population. Alcohol and drug misuse, related to their high incidence of injury and p...

Background Estimating the economic costs of self-injury mortality (SIM) can inform health planning and clinical and public health interventions, serve as a basis for their evaluation, and provide the foundation for broadly disseminating evidence-based policies and practices. SIM is operationalized as a composite of all registered suicides at any ag...

Importance: Self-injury mortality (SIM) combines suicides and the preponderance of drug misuse-related overdose fatalities. Identifying social and environmental factors associated with SIM and suicide may inform etiologic understanding and intervention design. Objective: To identify factors associated with interstate SIM and suicide rate variati...

Background There is strong evidence that suicides increase after media stories about suicides by celebrities, particularly those that highlight the suicide method (the Werther effect). Much less is known about the Papageno effect—the protective effects of media stories of hope and recovery from suicidal crises. A synthesis of the retrievable eviden...

This review summarizes recent research in four environmental areas affecting risk of deaths by suicide. Politically, the weight of the evidence suggests that laws increasing social welfare expenditures and other policies assisting persons with low incomes (e.g., minimum wage) tend to lower suicide rates. Other legal changes such as those restrictin...

Social distancing (e.g., school and business closings) has been emphasized in current sociopolitical efforts in controlling COVID‐19. Such policies are assumed to increase suicide risk through lowering social integration. While two studies have linked the presence of a pandemic to suicide rates, no study has assessed the degree of social distancing...

Background: Suicides by any method, plus 'nonsuicide' fatalities from drug self-intoxication (estimated from selected forensically undetermined and 'accidental' deaths), together represent self-injury mortality (SIM)-fatalities due to mental disorders or distress. SIM is especially important to examine given frequent undercounting of suicides amon...

Objective To examine the association between reporting on suicides, especially deaths of celebrities by suicide, and subsequent suicides in the general population. Design Systematic review and meta-analysis. Data sources PubMed/Medline, PsychInfo, Scopus, Web of Science, Embase, and Google Scholar, searched up to September 2019. Review methods S...

By providing information on help-seeking resources (HSR), Google's Suicide Prevention Results (SPR) fill a void, because less than 30% of news reports provide such information. This article addresses larger issues on media guidelines and suicide prevention. First, studies on the effects of providing HSR provide little support for a reduction in sui...

Importance On March 31, 2017, Netflix released the show 13 Reasons Why, sparking immediate criticism from suicide prevention organizations for not following media recommendations for responsible suicide portrayal and for possible suicide contagion by media. To date, little research has been conducted into the associations between the show and suici...

Aspects of social integration including religion, and residential stability have often been found to serve as protective factors against suicide in sociological analyses. However, empirical research on Canadian indigenous suicidality has neglected these dimensions of integration. The present study fills this gap, while controlling for other major p...

Objective Higher prevalence of suicide notes could signify more conservatism in accounting and greater proneness to undercounting of suicide by method. We tested two hypotheses: (1) an evidentiary suicide note is more likely to accompany suicides by drug-intoxication and by other poisoning, as less violent and less forensically overt methods, than...

The present analysis contributes to the existing literature on religion and suicide in three interrelated ways: (1) providing an analysis of suicide completions whereas most research is based on non-lethal levels of suicidality; (2) assessing the relationship with concrete individual level data on completed suicides instead of aggregated data marke...

Research on religion as a protective factor has been marked by four recurrent limitations: (1) an overemphasis on the United States, a nation where religiosity is relatively high; (2) a neglect of highly secularized zones of the world, where religiousness may be too weak to affect suicide; (3) restriction of religiousness to religious affiliation,...

Objective A paucity of corroborative psychological and psychiatric evidence may be inhibiting detection of drug intoxication suicides in the United States. We evaluated the relative importance of suicide notes and psychiatric history in the classification of suicide by drug intoxication versus firearm (gunshot wound) plus hanging/suffocation—the ot...

The relationship between religious orientation and suicidality can be more complex in samples of low religious rate. The present study was conducted in China, one of the least religious countries, with the purpose of exploring different aspects of religious orientation and their relationships to suicidality. Among a university sample of 2074 respon...

Temperature increases are associated with decreases in rainfall and ensuing crop yields. A recent study estimates that such warming over the last 30 years is responsible for 59,300 extra suicides in India, and proposes a new perspective to contextualize the linked effects of global warming in affected agricultural communities.

Scripts in the cinema provide a cultural definition of suicide, including where suicide takes place. Using opportunity theory, this study examines the concept of “lethal locations” to address questions regarding movies as a risk factor for suicide: (1) Do cinematic scripts overrepresent lethal locations? (2) Given sociological changes, have cinemat...

Previous work has suggested that economic development affects the direction of lethal violence through a civilizing process wherein there is a shift from an internal to an external locus of control. However, data were not available to measure locus of control. The present work assesses the relationship between a measure of control and the direction...

This book brings together the work of 34 experts on media and suicide. They are drawn from 9 countries. Some highlights: CHPT2: : Stack & Bowman (USA): The problem of why men choose firearms more than women is linked to the gender differential in the portrayal of firearm suicide in 1,145 cinematic suicides 1900-2013. Men are 3.9 times more apt than...

While suicide notes can offer insights into the causes of suicide and clues for prevention, there is disagreement regarding the degree to which note leavers are representative of the general population of suicides. Previous relevant research on the United States is marked by a series of limitations: small local samples, an over focus on demographic...

Sociological work on suicide stresses social forces over individual-centred causes. Since the classic work of Durkheim, the construct of social integration has guided much sociological work. In the present chapter, research on two central integrative institutions is reviewed: marriage and religion. At the concrete individual level, divorced persons...

Background: Suicide message boards have been at the core of debates about negative influences of the Internet on suicidality. Nothing is currently known about communication styles that may help users to psychologically improve in these settings. Method: In all, 1182 archival threads with 20 499 individual postings from seven non-professional sui...

Durkheim's social integration perspective on suicide continues to be the basis of much sociological work on the link between family integration and suicide. The ecological perspective has been commonly used to understand suicide. Marital disruption is one of the ecological factors. Suicidogenic conditions such as mental, physical, and economic stra...

Methods: Data refer to official government sources on lethal violence rates and measures of social deprivation. The central dependent variable (SHR) is the tendency towards suicide measured as the suicide rate divided by the sum of the suicide and homicide rates. Data were available for 102 Italian provinces in the Census year 2001. Results: The...

Maris Ronald , Pillaged: Psychiatric Medications and Suicide Risk (Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 2015), pp. 192, $49.95, hardcover, ISBN: 978-1-61117-460-1. - Volume 59 Issue 4 - Steven Stack

Cultural perspectives on suicidality have been largely marked by work explaining variability in suicide acceptability in the United States using structural variables including marital status and demographics, and limited symbolic or values orientations such as feminism, political liberalism, and civil liberties. The present article applies recent d...

There has been no systematic work on the short- or long-term impact of the installation of crisis phones on suicides from bridges. The present study addresses this issue. Data refer to 219 suicides from 1954 through 2013 on the Skyway Bridge in St. Petersburg, Florida. Six crisis phones with signs were installed in July 1999. In the first decade af...

Religiosity has been a major, long standing construct in sociological analyses of suicide, but has received relatively less attention in other disciplines within Suicidology. Research on the four major explanations for a link between religiosity and suicide acceptability are reviewed: religious affiliation/integration, religious commitment, religio...

Previous individual-level research on the association between the status of divorce and suicide risk has been marked by two recurrent limitations: (a) it is not clear if the timing of divorce (recent vs. distal) affects risk of completed suicides and (b) it is not clear if the association between divorce and suicide completions will withstand contr...

While enrollment in online courses has tripled in ten years, little is known about the impact of different exam-taking environments on learning. A recent study of economics students found that online students taking un-proctored exams scored one letter grade higher than online students taking proctored exams. However, there were no apparent systema...

Relative enrollment in online classes has tripled over the last ten years, but the efficacy of learning online remains unclear. While two recent Meta analyses report higher exam grades for online vs. traditional classes, this body of research has been marked by two recurrent limitations: (1) a possible problem of selection bias wherein students sel...

Over the last decade, enrollment in online courses has tripled. However, the delivery of online sections of courses that typically require laboratory work on campus can present a challenge. The present study has two goals: (1) describe the laboratory assignments for an online version of an undergraduate research methods course, and (2) assess the e...

Relative enrollment in online classes has tripled over the last ten years, but the efficacy of learning online remains unclear. While two recent Meta analyses report higher exam grades for online vs. traditional classes, this body of research has been marked by two recurrent limitations: (1) a possible problem of selection bias wherein students sel...

Review of Tanya Jukkala's Suicide in Russia: A Macrosociological Study. The book provides an overview of the epidemiology of suicide in Russia often using data from original sources in Russian that are inaccessible to the English speaking world. Topics include a time series analysis of trends beginning in 1875, an age,period cohort analysis of suic...

Dramatic aspects of suicide provide clues to the understanding of the act. Suicides make decisions on such considerations as the location for the suicide (e.g., at work, at home, on a rooftop) , the presence or absence of an audience, dress, temporal considerations such as the day and hour of the week, and method of suicide. The book has 26 substan...

Henry Morselli (1882), one of the founders of suicidology, considered exploring regularities in the methods of suicide and the places where suicide occur to be a fundamental task in the epidemiology of suicide. Using data from twenty-two European nations and regions, he was able to demonstrate patterns in these features of suicide. In particular, t...

A series of studies examining the staging of the suicidal act: location, method used, leaving a suicide note, clothing worn, etc.

Copycat deaths are likely in the wake of the suicide of Robin Williams. More restrained coverage might help, says Steven Stack

Citation analysis has been neglected in suicidology. The present note applies a mixed methods approach to both test and suggest hypotheses for the variation in article impact in the bereavement literature. 103 articles from three core suicidology journals met the criteria for inclusion in the investigation. Citations to the articles were obtained f...

The aims of this study were to analyze annual trends of charcoal burning (CB) suicide, 2000 to 2011, and to examine the risk factors of CB suicide in Korea. Data on suicides (n=138,938) were obtained from the Statistics Korea. The proportion of CB suicides among all suicide deaths reported was 0.7% (84 cases) in 2007, and since 2008 it has rapidly...

This study investigated the nature of media coverage of a national entertainer's suicide and its impact on subsequent suicides. After the celebrity suicide, the number of suicide-related articles reported surged around 80 times in the week after the suicide compared with the week prior. Many articles (37.1%) violated several critical items on the W...

Objectives Research on the relationship between teaching productivity and base salary is sparse, but tends to find no association. However, the research is based largely on student evaluations (student evaluation of teaching (SET)). No study uses peer review of teaching, which may capture qualities of excellence in teaching missed by SETs. The pres...

Citation analysis has been neglected in suicidology. The present note applies a mixed-methods approach to both test and suggest hypotheses for the variation in article impact in the bereavement literature. One hundred three articles from three core suicidology journals met the criteria for inclusion in the investigation. Citations to the articles w...

Research on the impact of exposure to suicide movies on suicidality has been marked by three limitations. It is largely based on (1) aggregate data subject to the ecological fallacy, (2) exposure to a single movie, and (3) relative lack of controls for psychological states & social factors linked to suicide. The present study addresses these gaps....

Hegemonic masculinity includes values such as competition, material success, physical prowess, and aggression. Over the last century, women have increasingly taken on aspects of the male gender role including labor force participation and as breadwinners in single parent households. Economic failure and strain (e.g., unemployment, financial problem...

The extent to which discussion promotes learning outcomes is a relatively unexplored area in teaching. The present paper contributes to the literature by assessing the extent to which student use of a discussion board is predictive of grades. The sample consists of 341 students who completed an online course in criminology. Learning outcomes are me...

Which factors distinguish suicide attempters from suicide ideators is a relatively neglected question in suicidology. Data from the 2001 Youth Risk Behavior Survey, encompassing 1,439 youth suicide ideators and 1,097 attempters, was used to explore which factors best differentiate suicide attempters from ideators, with a focus on violence involveme...

The number of citations a scholarly work receives is a common measure of its impact on a field. Citation classics are works that are the most highly cited. The purpose of the present article is to describe and analyze citation classics in the journal Deviant Behavior (DB) and to compare them to classics in related academic journals. Data are from t...

While there has been a great deal of empirical research that links the culture of violence to homicide, there has been no rigorous assessment of the possible link between cultural support of violence and suicide risk. Given that suicidality is often association with higher levels of aggression and fearlessness (e.g., Joiner 2005), it is plausible t...

This article provides the first quantitative review of the literature on music and suicidality. Multivariate logistic regression techniques are applied to 90 findings from 21 studies. Investigations employing ecological data on suicide completions are 19.2 times more apt than other studies to report a link between music and suicide. More recent and...

The number of citations a scholarly work receives is a common measure of its impact on the scientific literature; "citation classics" are the most highly cited works. The content of Suicide and Life-Threatening Behavior (SLTB) citation classics is described here. The impact of SLTB citation classics is compared to their counterparts in journals hav...

Provoking police officers to kill oneself or "suicide by cop" (SBC) has received scholarly as well as public attention. The extent to which film representations of SBC reflect SBC in society in relation to danger, depression, and other features was assessed in this study. Data on cinematic portrayals of SBC are from 16 American films; corresponding...

A growing number of studies indicate that sensationalist reporting of suicide is associated with increases in suicide rates, but in the light of some negative findings, the issue has remained controversial. The aim of this study was to evaluate the best current evidence on the association between celebrity suicide stories and subsequent suicides. L...

The book presents the first ever systematic analysis of the portrayal of suicide in the cinema over 110 years. It is based on a thorough analysis of 1,377 suicides in American and 135 in British films. The focus is on 7 broad categories of suicide motives. There is a chapter devoted to each. Individual centered motives are, with the percentage of f...

The notion that widespread media coverage of a suicide can result in an increase in suicide within society dates back at least to 1774. The main character in Goethe's popular novel, The Sorrows of Young Man Werther, commits suicide as a result of his enduring problems in love. The novel was reportedly linked to a wave of suicides among young people...

The effect of unemployment on suicide risk has been studied with a variety of research methodologies including those at both the aggregate and individual levels of analysis. There are many convincing research findings linking unemployment to suicidality. For example, for the period 1900-2000, the suicide rate in the USA peaked in 1932-33, the point...

This article describes the distribution of divorce by demographic groups as well as trends in divorce in both the United States and 24 other developed nations. Macro- and individual-level explanations of divorce are reviewed. Key macrolevel explanations include the liberalization of divorce laws and the strength of religion. Individual-level predic...

Research on the relationship between social integration and suicide rates has neglected a historical perspective. Analyses are often based on relatively short time periods where there may not be enough variation in integration to affect the national suicide rate, or where overall integration levels are not low enough to buttress a link between a sp...

IntroductionReligion and Suicidality: A Review of Research and TheoryNew Analysis of an Integrated ModelResultsDiscussionConclusion References

Four perspectives (moral community thesis, religious integration, religious commitment, and social networks) guide the selection of variables in this study. Data are from the combined World Values/European Values Surveys for 2000 (50,547 individuals nested in 56 nations). The results of a multivariate hierarchical linear model support all four pers...

Previous work on Russian roulette has focused on data from large cities. It is unclear if the epidemiological patterns based on large cities will replicate for the nation as a whole, and if the influence of minority status will be moderated by urban context. The present investigation fills these gaps by providing descriptive epidemiological data on...

Cultural explanations of black suicide have focused on the US and stressed religiosity as a protective factor. This paper adds to this literature by (1) expanding the analysis of the impact of religiosity on black suicide to 10 nations, and (2) assessing the extent to which a broader cultural construct (self expressionism) affects black suicide acc...

This article reviews the findings of 84 sociological studies published over a 15-year period. These studies deal with tests of the modernization and/or social integration perspectives on suicide. Research on modernization, religious integration, and political integration often questioned or reformulated the traditional Durkheimian perspective. A ma...

The impact of the heavy metal music subculture on suicide has been the subject of much public debate but little scholarly research. The present paper assesses this relationship with data on heavy metal magazine subscriptions and youth suicide in the 50 states. We find that, controlling for other predictors of suicide, the greater the strength of th...

Background: Suicide undercounting is an ever-present problem in the US according to an Institute of Medicine report. Not previously linked, counter trends in suicide and unintentional poisoning rates have been separately reported. Objectives: To compare trends in suicide and poisoning mortality rates, and assess whether these trends were independen...

Suicide officially kills approximately 30,000 annually in the United States. Analysis of this leading public health problem is complicated by undercounting. Despite persisting socioeconomic and health disparities, non-Hispanic Blacks and Hispanics register suicide rates less than half that of non-Hispanic Whites. This cross-sectional study uses mul...

Two counter trends in injury mortality have been separately reported in the US in recent times - a declining suicide rate and a rapidly rising unintentional poisoning mortality rate. Poisoning suicides are especially difficult to detect, and injury of undetermined intent is the underlying cause-of-death category most likely to reflect this difficul...

One of the unexamined issues in China is the public attitude toward prostitution. Little is known about public opinion on prostitution in China or Asia, and no work exists regarding the association between family values and public opinion on prostitution. Data from the World Values Surveys were used to explore social determinants of the attitude to...

Explanations of variability in public opinion on crime have drawn disproportionately from the literature on specific symbolic orientations including religious fundamentalism and racial prejudice. In contrast, this article hypothesizes that public opinion is linked to the strength of a general cultural axis of nations: survivalism vs. self-expressio...

Replies to H. P. Whitt's (see record 1986-27461-001) comments on the present author's (see record 1983-28230-001) portrayal of a previous article by Whitt et al (see record 1973-00738-001) regarding the relationship between lethal aggression and suicide by providing further explanation for the present author's interpretation of Whitt and his col...

Clinician training deficits and a low and declining autopsy rate adversely impact the quality of death certificates in the United States. Self-report and records data for the general population indicate that proximate mental and physical health of minority suicides was at least as poor as that of white suicides. This cross-sectional mortality study...

That males have higher suicide rates than females is one of the most empirically documented social facts in suicidology, but the reasons for this continue to be debated. For the present paper, we tested a neglected contributing factor to the gender suicide ratio: wound site or the area of the body that is wounded in firearm suicides. Males may have...

Artistic portrayals have been neglected in suicide studies. This anthology first presents ten chapters on the portrayal of suicide in such areas as paintings (chapter by Karolina Krysinka), movies (chapters by Burcu Sevin , Stack & Bowman, and literature (including chapters on the detective novel and suicide by Fred Mench & Lisa Honaker, and suicid...

The epidemiology of a neglected form of suicidal behavior, Russian roulette, is addressed. Also tested is an explanation of racial differences based on the opportunity theory of deviant behavior related to the availability of revolvers, necessary weapons with which to play Russian roulette. Data refer to 15 cases of Russian roulette found through a...