The famous YouTuber “Logan Paul” who has over 15 million subscriber made a video of a dead body which he found in Japan suicide forest. It was a shameful act by Logan Paul showing disrespectful treatment to a dead body.
In the video he with his friends was wandering in the suicide forest and after some time they got a glimpse of a body hanging from a tree. And to know more about it they got close to it and found that it was a real body. Now at this time one might stop his camera and call for help but Logan Paul and his friends continued filming the dead body. Paul also walks up to the body, providing closeups of the man’s hands and zooming in on the pockets of the victim to point out he still has his wallet and his bag was still on the ground near him.
The danger is that such detailed, sensationalized coverage of suicide can prompt copycat behavior — a phenomenon called suicide contagion. “Suicide contagion is real, which is why I’m concerned about it,” Madelyn Gould, a professor of Epidemiology in Psychiatry at Columbia University, told The New York Times after actor Robin Williams’ widely publicized death from suicide.
The power people like Logan Paul have to reach young audiences means they have a responsibility to treat the subject of suicide with care. Fortunately, organizations like the World Health Organization and the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention have posted recommendations for reporting on the subject. YouTubers considering a similar, disrespectful, and dangerous stunt would do well to consider these best practices, too.
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