The month after 13 Reasons Why premiered, the U.S. suicide rate for 10-to-17-year-olds rose 28.9%, the highest of any single month in five years. Whether the show caused it is still one of the most contested questions in media research.
The show built its first season around the death of Hannah Baker and closed the finale on a nearly three-minute scene of her taking her own life. The young-adult novel it adapted never showed the death at all. The producers added it on purpose, arguing that depicting the horror in full would stop anyone from wanting to copy it.
A 2019 study in the Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry put roughly 195 youth deaths above the expected trend that year. April 2017 logged the worst monthly youth rate in the entire window they examined.
Then the clean story breaks. The increase ran almost entirely through boys, though the protagonist was a girl. A later reanalysis from Annenberg found the effect in boys started the month before the show streamed, which no causal account explains. Youth suicide rates were already climbing for reasons that predate any Netflix release.
Netflix moved in July 2019. On the advice of the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention's chief medical officer, it re-cut the finale so the death now happens off screen. More than two years after release, after two more seasons had already shipped.
The version they settled on matched the book from 2007. Show the parents finding her, skip the act. A measurable public-health fight and two years of streaming to land on the restraint the source material started with.
‘13 Reasons Why’ premiered 9 years ago