One hundred and twenty one high school students filled in three questionnaires about their music, their reasons for living and their darkest thoughts, and the two psychologists who published the answers in the journal Adolescence in the summer of 1999 were Karen Scheel and John Westefeld. The metal fans came out worse on two measures. Nearly all of the students, fans included, said that music lifted their mood.
Both halves of that result are true, and the heavy metal suicide myth has survived for forty years by quoting only the first. In 1903 René Blondlot, at the University of Nancy, announced a new radiation he called N-rays, which made a faint electric spark glow brighter wherever they fell, and laboratories across France were soon seeing it too. The visitor who sat in his darkened room in 1904, reached into the apparatus and quietly lifted out its aluminium prism, the one part meant to bend the rays, was Robert Wood of Johns Hopkins.
Blondlot went on sliding a thin line of phosphorescent paint through the dark and reporting the bent rays exactly where he expected them, with nothing left on the bench to bend them. Wood could have taken a hammer to the whole apparatus and the glow would still have come, because it came from the eye watching for it. The case against the music read the record the same way for thirty years. The studies went looking at the watcher.
The deaths that reached American courtrooms in the 1980s, and the suits the families brought over them, are set down plainly in the chapter above. The science ran on a separate track and asked a narrower question: whether the listening came before the despair, or the despair before the listening. The creed of the accusers had assumed the answer. Nobody in a courtroom ever tested it.
What the heavy metal suicide studies measured
Drawn from two randomly chosen high schools in South Australia, the teenagers questioned for a paper in the Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry in May 1993 had split along the line of sex before any question about health was put, 74 per cent of the girls preferring pop and 70.7 per cent of the boys rock or metal.
The Flinders Medical Centre psychiatrist who led that team was Graham Martin, and the associations he and his colleagues reported ran long: a preference for rock and metal went with suicidal thoughts, deliberate self harm, depression, delinquency, drug taking and trouble at home, all of it more strongly among the girls. The authors called the study preliminary. Its sharpest finding was about something else.
Feeling sadder after listening to the music a teenager loved was what marked out the most disturbed group, and that is a fact about a listener, not about a genre. The same record that steadied one student was a mirror held up to another, and a questionnaire could not see which was which. It could only count.
Feeling sadder after listening was a fact about a listener, not about a genre.
Six years later Scheel and Westefeld found the same shape in an American school, male fans reporting weaker reasons for living and female fans more thoughts of suicide, and they drew the conclusion in plain terms: a preference for the music might be a red flag, with the source of the trouble lying more in personal and family circumstances than in anything the records did.
Religion, personality and the country music test
The Wayne State criminologist who put the question to the General Social Survey, the long-running poll of American adults, and reported in 1998 that metal fans were more accepting of suicide than other people was Steven Stack. The link vanished once religiosity was held constant. Metal fans went to church less, and people who go to church less are more accepting of suicide, whatever is on the stereo.
In 1992 the same man had published a stranger finding. With Jim Gundlach he set the airtime that radio in 49 American metropolitan areas gave to country music against the white suicide rate, and reported in Social Forces that the more country a city heard, the more suicides it counted, independently of divorce, poverty, the South and the number of guns. Nobody asked for a warning sticker on Hank Williams.
The figure did not survive other hands. Going back through the numbers, Edward Maguire and Jeffrey Snipes could not reproduce the effect, and a 1996 survey of students by David Lester and M. Whipple found no link at all between country music and depression, while a liking for heavy metal went with earlier suicidal thoughts.
| Study | Who was asked | What it found | What it could not show |
|---|---|---|---|
| Martin, Clarke and Pearce, 1993 | Students at two South Australian high schools | Rock and metal preference linked to suicidal thoughts and self harm, most of all in girls | Which came first |
| Stack, Gundlach and Reeves, 1994 | The fifty American states, by metal magazine subscriptions | More subscriptions, higher youth suicide rate | Anything about a single listener |
| Stack, 1998 | American adults in the General Social Survey | Fans more accepting of suicide | Any link once religiosity was counted |
| Scheel and Westefeld, 1999 | 121 students at one American high school | Weaker reasons for living, more suicidal thoughts | A direct effect of the music |
| Rustad and colleagues, 2003 | 237 college volunteers in two experiments | Suicide themes primed in storytelling | Any change in mood, attitudes or risk |
| North and Hargreaves, 2006 | Adolescents and adults in the United Kingdom | A link with self harm, weakened by other factors | That the music came before the thoughts |
Which came first
The two Leicester psychologists who finally asked the question in the right order were Adrian North and David Hargreaves, and their 2006 paper in Suicide and Life-Threatening Behavior found the association between what they called problem music, hard rock, rap and punk, and self harm, then watched it weaken, in two measures into nothing, once self-esteem, delinquency and conservatism were counted. The first listening did not come before the thoughts.
A crutch turns up under the arm of nearly every patient in a fracture clinic, and a surveyor who counted crutches and broken legs across a city would find them perfectly matched and could, with the same arithmetic, conclude that aluminium snaps shin bones. Kick the crutch away and the leg is still broken. Take the records off a teenager in trouble and the trouble stays in the room, minus the one thing he chose to carry it with.
The experimenters who played rock videos and songs with and without suicidal content to 237 volunteers at the Catholic University of America, and published in 2003, were Robin Rustad and four colleagues. Afterwards the volunteers who had heard suicidal content wrote more stories with suicide in them when asked to make one up. On mood, attitudes and every measure tied to risk there was virtually no difference. A word planted is not a wish.
The songs that stood accused
The Californian band whose 1994 ballad was pulled from MTV because the channel read its French chorus of farewell as an endorsement of suicide was Megadeth, and "A Tout le Monde", from Youthanasia, went back on the air only with a message at the end telling viewers that suicide was no answer. Dave Mustaine has said the song was about something else entirely. The card stayed.
The Birmingham four whose 1973 song carried the most alarming title in the early catalogue were Black Sabbath, and "Killing Yourself to Live", on Sabbath Bloody Sabbath, carries its paradox in the title itself: the killing is done in order to live. Halfway through, the riff breaks into a sprint and tramples its own slow opening flat. Anyone who listened past the title heard it.
The plainest song about wanting to die that heavy metal had yet produced came out on Ride the Lightning in July 1984, and the band that recorded "Fade to Black" was Metallica, whose singer has said that hundreds of letters arrived from listeners telling the band the song had made them feel better. A song can name despair and still be company. That is what the letters said.
Many men are melancholy by hearing music, but it is a pleasing melancholy that it causeth; and therefore to such as are discontent, in woe, fear, sorrow, or dejected, it is a most present remedy.
Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621)
What the evidence allows
Read together, the heavy metal suicide research says one thing with the weight of repetition behind it: a teenager in trouble may reach for the loudest and darkest music on the shelf, and the reaching is worth noticing. None of it ever showed the record putting the trouble there. Every attempt to catch the music acting alone routed out a quieter suspect: home, faith, schooling, the mood before the first play.
The American argument was carried on in journals and courtrooms. The heavy metal moral panic in Britain was a smaller affair, run on letters and petitions rather than on regression tables.
The attested finding is the modest one. A teenager who feels worse after the records than before them is worth a conversation. The records are not the thing to confiscate.
Anyone struggling can reach the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline in the United States by calling or texting 988, and Samaritans in the UK and Ireland on 116 123.
