Research on the impact of suicide reports is traditionally focussed on two possible outcomes: On the one hand, there is ample evidence for additional copycat effects after media coverage of suicides referred to as ‘Werther-Effect’, on the other hand, suicide rates decrease after appropriate media depictions of suicides referred to as ‘Papageno-Effect’. In contrast, studies that only limitedly support these imitative or preventive effects – i.e. all ambiguous findings – are hardly regarded.

The present study exclusively focuses on all studies (n = 28) with equivocal findings on the connection between media coverage of suicides and factual suicides and aims to systematically analyse central characteristics of these studies.

A qualitative content analysis of identified studies has been conducted whose results are systematized in Table 1.

The analysis shows that a lion's share of ambiguous studies draws on aggregate data and unidirectionally hypothesises harmful media effect, which only insufficiently describes reality.

Future hypotheses on the imitation of suicides should be formulated in a more differentiated (bi-directional) way and studies should include content analyses of media coverage as far as possible.

Table 1 Analysis of all studies that ambiguously prove copycat suicides after media coverage of suicides.