BMJ  2004;329:817 (9 October), doi:10.1136/bmj.329.7470.817-a

News

Can country music drive you to suicide?

New York

The Ig Nobel award for medicine—one of the prizes given annually to scientists who have produced unusual research—was given this year to a team of researchers who had found that cities in which radio stations played a higher than average amount of country music had higher than average suicide rates.

The award went to Steven Stack of Wayne State University, Michigan, and James Gundlach of Auburn University, Alabama, for their report, The Effect of Country Music on Suicide. Dr Stack protested to the BMJ that it was unfair of Newsweek to call him and his colleague "academic coneheads."

"We had hard data showing that cities with higher than average country music radio market share had higher white suicide rates," he said. African-American suicide rates, he explained, were not affected by the country music market ( Social Forces 1992;71: 211-8[CrossRef]).

Odd science, from the peculiar . . . [Full text of this article]

-->
CiteULike    Complore    Connotea    Del.icio.us    Digg    Reddit    Technorati    What's this?

This article has been cited by other articles:

• (2004). Hit parade. BMJ 329: 1350-1350 [Full text]  

Rapid Responses:

Read all Rapid Responses

INXS or Morrison vs Cash and Mellancamp

Jaspreet S Somal
bmj.com, 10 Oct 2004 [Full text]

Can country music drive you to suicide?

Andrew Tattersall
bmj.com, 12 Oct 2004 [Full text]

Re: Can country music drive you to suicide?

mc feliciello
bmj.com, 12 Oct 2004 [Full text]

Chickens, Eggs and Freedom

Lisa C Blakemore-Brown
bmj.com, 13 Oct 2004 [Full text]

Association is not causation

David J Brookman
bmj.com, 13 Oct 2004 [Full text]

country music and suicide

james davis
bmj.com, 2 Feb 2008 [Full text]