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Comment & Response
September 25, 2019

Ignoring Data Delays Our Reaction to Emerging Public Health Tragedies Like 13 Reasons Why

Author Affiliations
  • 1Division of Health Policy, Department of Family Medicine and Public Health, University of California San Diego, La Jolla
  • 2Department of Computer Science, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Maryland
  • 3Division of Infectious Diseases and Global Public Health, Department of Medicine, University of California San Diego, La Jolla
JAMA Psychiatry. 2020;77(1):102-103. doi:10.1001/jamapsychiatry.2019.2755

To the Editor We applaud Niederkrotenthaler and colleagues1 for adding another layer of evidence that 13 Reasons Why is harming the public by pushing some individuals toward suicide. However, their dismissal of some of the earliest evidence on this subject deserves a revision not because it undermines their central claim but because it makes it even stronger and can make psychiatric epidemiology more actionable in the future.

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