2024.04.12
Takahiro Arai, a student in the Doctoral Programs (Major in Public Health, Sport and Health Sciences, Medical Management) of our graduate school, received the Andrej Marušič Award at the International Association for Suicide Prevention (IASP) conference held in Piran, Slovenia in September 2023. The award was established in memory of Andrej Marušič, a Slovenian psychiatrist who made significant contributions to suicide research, and is given to outstanding young researchers conducting studies on suicide-related behavior and its prevention. Mr. Arai is the first Japanese person to receive this award.
The IASP is an organization that works globally on suicide countermeasures and prevention in collaboration with the World Health Organization (WHO). Mr. Arai's research, which focuses on suicide countermeasures in cyberspace, was highly praised as a new approach to suicide prevention, leading to this award.
Mr. Arai gave an oral presentation on his research titled "Quantitative analysis of the Werther Effect on suicide following celebrity suicide reports in Japan: Instantaneous and persistent risk," which concerns a quantitative approach using internet searches to study the Werther effect (a phenomenon where the number of suicides increases due to media reports on suicide).
Additionally, at the "NII-IDR User Forum 2023" hosted by the National Institute of Informatics on December 11, Mr. Arai received a Corporate Award for "The Relationship Between Review Patterns and Satisfaction of Diet Food Users Through Latent Class Analysis," a presentation he gave jointly with Yuki Nishida, another student in the same graduate school's Doctoral Programs.