Dr. Anne Doherty:

The answer to the Senator is I do not know. That study was done on a population based status so it is very difficult to drill down and figure out exactly what was going on for the individual. However, I was initially surprised. I am moving to a slightly different area, but if we think about all of the literature around suicide contagion, we have very clear rules around how the media reports suicide because people can be very vulnerable to hearing something and it influencing how they might behave themselves or how they might see things themselves. That is a very real phenomenon that does exist and it has been documented in the literature. I would have been worried that that might have been the case in situations where assisted dying is legalised, in particular in countries where it is called "assisted suicide" and there is that name association with it. I would have thought from my understanding of suicide and self-harm that there could be a contagion effect so I was surprised to hear people say that it might reduce suicide because for me that felt quite counterintuitive. When we went through the literature we basically found that it did not decrease the amount of suicide. In many countries it was stable. In many, the suicide levels overall actually went up. A lot of the studies were quite robust, so they did not just look at rates in isolation, they controlled for societal factors that might impact suicidality. The Dutch study, for example, controlled for unemployment, religiosity and divorce because they felt that they were factors that might influence how people might proceed towards suicide anyway. They were quite complex analyses and they did show overall trends upwards but when you control for the other societal factors that influence suicide, certainly in the Netherlands, it was a flat result with no increase or no decrease.