The Impact of Televised Movies about Suicide: [Letter]

Abstract

[...]failure to identify the audience exposed to the television movies is a regrettable but not fatal flaw in the design of the Gould and Shaffer study. [...]given the small number of completed suicides and the small number of broadcasts, the statistical power to detect a significant effect was low (less than 0.15, assuming a medium effect of the media1). [...]the number of attempted suicides (42) and completed suicides (3) in the six-week period preceding the televised movies was not significantly lower than the expected number of attempted (52.8) and completed suicides (7.44) (P>0.05, by the binomial test).