With this eponym, we know the increase in suicide cases that follow the appearance of stories about real suicide cases in the newspapers and that occur in geographically close areas of distribution of the medium. Also known as the " copycat effect," and is more likely to occur when the model is a celebrity. A landmark case is the suicide epidemic that followed the death of Marilyn Monroe in 1962.
Its name refers to the novel by Johan W. von Goethe entitled "The sufferings of young Werther" (1774), which tells the story of a young man who, after a love disappointment, commits suicide with a shot in the head . The sale of the book was banned in several places in Europe because it triggered a wave of suicides in young people using the same method used by the protagonist of the work.
