The association of internet searches and actual suicide in Spain

Abstract

High suicide rates are a major issue in Spain, to the extent that they are the main non-natural cause of death in this country. The present study analyses the relationship between Internet searches and actual suicide rates in Spain. For this purpose, we employ data from actual suicide rates and Google^® searches for Spain, differencing by the means used to commit suicide. Our results show that suicide (“suicidio”) search term seems to be positively associated with higher total suicide rates, in addition to suicides using poison, suffocation and jumping. The suicide (“suicidio”) topic presents similar results to the suicide search term, and suicide by car crash also seems to be associated with Internet searches of this topic.

Keywords:

• Google trends^®
• spain
• suicide

JEL Codes:

• I10
• D91
• C22

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data availability statement

Official suicide data was provided by the Spanish Office of National Statistics (Instituto Nacional de Estadística) and Internet search data was obtained from Google Trends^®.

Notes

1 Information retrieved from https://www.cdc.gov/suicide/facts/index.html.

2 Google Trends^®: https://trends.google.com.

3 These could be checked in https://trends.google.es/trends/explore?date=all&geo=ES&q=hotel.

4 The year 2009 has been chosen as the last starting point of our temporal series in order to avoid shortening the series too much (which may compromise the validity of our results) and to the extent that by 2009 at least 61.8% of the Spanish population declared that they had used the Internet in the last three months (INE, 2021).

5 Complete estimations of Table 1 are presented in Table A2 (Appendix).

Additional information

Funding

This work has been partly supported by the Andalusian Regional Government (SEJ-645).