Flow of information is a potent theme in today’s world. On one hand, it is the gateway to an aware and well-informed society while on the other; it can lead to socially non-optimal situations and in the extreme case, have dangerous repercussions. One example of such a negative impact is the spread of suicide epidemics. A paper, http://cpi.kagoshima-u.ac.jp/occasional/vol-36/33-42.pdf, by Anthropologist Donald H. Rubinstein discusses the surge in suicide rates among young males in Micronesia. Between 1960 and 1989, there were more suicides in this sparse archipelago than anywhere else in the world. Teenagers committed suicides for trivial reasons like being yelled at by parents, not having a graduation gown, or because a girlfriend had been seen with another boy. It is claimed that the trigger for this unfortunate series of events was the following incident. In November 1966, the well-known son of one of Ebeye’s (a Micronesian island) wealthiest families hanged himself when he could not decide between his two girlfriends, having fathered a child with each. This event caused considerable commotion in the society. Three days later, a 22-year old struggling with marital difficulties committed suicide. For an island that had not heard of suicide in the last twelve years, two suicides in the same week served as a catalyst for an epidemic. Over the next twenty years, the suicide rate among teenage males in Micronesia peaked at 160 per 100,000 (the comparable rate in the United States is 22 per 100,000). While quoting this incident in The Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell states that ‘suicide can be contagious’. Studies have found that immediately after media coverage of suicide accounts, suicide rates jump. This is particularly true when a celebrity is involved. For example, Marilyn Monroe’s suicide was followed by a temporary 12 percent increase in the national suicide rate in the US. A similar wave of suicides was observed in Cuba in the1970s. The island’s people were emotionally shattered when President Fidel Castro’s plans for a record 10 million ton sugar harvest failed. After that catastrophe, Cuba’s suicide rate nearly tripled, from 8 per 100,000 people in 1969 to 23.2 per 100,000 in 1982.

Such alarming rates highlight the magnitude of impact that people’s reactions and decisions can have. The fact that such trends are noticeable in groups as big as nations raises disturbing questions concerning the risks of sharing information. Knowing that someone embraced suicide as the solution to his/her problems invites other depressed people to do the same. Under the overarching theme of making ideas commonplace and acceptable, flow of information forces otherwise rational human beings to fall into the trap of information cascades. A morbid extension of this trend can be seen in young children who have been found to attempt suicides in a ‘spirit of imitation and experimental play’. An 11 year old boy in Micronesia attempted to hang himself while ‘trying out suicide’. More recently (in 2004), a convict Dhananjoy Chatterjee was hanged in India; the first execution of the country since 1995 (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/south_asia/3597316.stm). After this incident, three children died while enacting his execution. One of them was a 12 year old girl who was showing her younger brother how Dhananjoy was executed. Such incidents can be attributed to media overkill, to which young children are particularly susceptible but the potential threat of uncontrolled information flow cannot be ignored. In a broader sense, any attempt to provide an explanation for a social problem of this complexity, particularly one that cuts across boundaries of maturity, race and gender, always runs the risk of over-simplification. Yet, there are reasons to believe that in the real world, usefulness of sharing information is invariably ambiguous.