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When an Ontario police officer killed himself in his police station and a politician’s spouse died after years of depression this past week, their sudden ends became very public matters.

The discussion was much less dramatic but not unlike what met the 1999 suicide of Gaetan Girouard, a beloved Quebec TV personality whose death spawned an avalanche of media coverage and public grief. His highly publicized demise was followed, as well, by something more chilling: a sudden spike in other suicides, including a cluster of similar hangings in Ste-Foy, the small city where Mr. Girouard took his life.

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A University of Quebec study concluded the media were at least partly responsible for 50 additional suicides.

It is the kind of cautionary tale that has informed longstanding curbs on reporting of the act, and encouraged public officials to scrupulously avoid comments that might spread the suicide “contagion.”