The Seoul Central Prosecutors Office said analysis of deaths in seven Seoul districts including Jongno and Gangnam-gu from the beginning of the year to March. 17 revealed that there were 2.13 suicides a day in the 23-day period after Lee’s suicide. This was 2.5 times the daily average of 0.84 during the 53-day period before Lee’s suicide.

A woman in her 20s who hung herself in her room on the morning of March 1 told people around her that she had found a way to free herself from debt after learning of actress Lee Eun-ju’s suicide, police said. The incident motivated police to analyze suicide statistics of certain neighborhoods in Seoul before and after Lee's suicide on Feb. 22.

Of the suicides that followed Lee’s death, 15 were in their 20s, as opposed to seven before. There was also a change in methods. Hanging accounted for 80 percent of the suicides after Lee’s death, as opposed to 53 percent before, while 14 out of the 15 individuals in their 20s who killed themselves after Lee’s death chose hanging.

Prosecutors said copycat suicide waves after the suicides of famous people are known as the “Werther Effect”, from a 19th century suicide fad among young Europeans who had read Goethe’s “The Sorrows of Young Werther”, whose protagonist shoots himself with a pistol.

An official said a look at the suicide notes indicated that many of the suicides were impulsive, following fights with boyfriends or scolding by parents. He said while copycat suicides were a temporary phenomenon they nonetheless deserved attention. Media reports that glamorize or romanticize suicides can encourage copycat acts, he added.

(englishnews@chosun.com )