Tipping Point By Malcolm Gladwell - Chapter on Suicides

He talks of a South Pacific island Micronesia where a seventeen year old boy got into an argument with his father, father told him to get out of the house and he then committed suicide. For an island where suicide was unknown in 1960s, by the end of 1980s there were more suicides per capita in Micronesia than anywhere else in the world.

The book says - The central observation of those who study suicide is that in some places and under some circumstances, the act of one person taking his or her own life can be contagious. Suicides lead to suicides. Thus as suicide grows more frequent in these communities the idea itself acquires a certain familiarity if not fascination (to young men in the case of Micronesia) and the lethality of the act seems to be trivialized. Especially among some younger boys, the suicide act appears to have acquired an experimental almost recreational element”

It concludes with - AN ACT THAT HAS BECOME AN IMPORTANT FORM OF SELF EXPRESSION” – people who die in highly publicized suicides – whose deaths give others “permission to die” serve as the Tipping Points in suicide epidemics.