Martin Plöderl - Moon and suicide - An example of debunking a likely false positive finding

23 February 2023
In my presentation, I will summarize the process of replicating a surprising finding of researchers who reported about a statistically significant increase of suicide rates during full moon in northern Finland, but only among younger women, and only in winter. We failed to replicate this finding with much larger samples based on the Austrian and Swedish suicide register. The finding from Finland was likely false positive. I will discuss problematic research and publication practices related to these findings.
Martin Plöderl is a clinical psychologist and psychotherapist at the Paracelus Medical University, Salzburg. He does some research, with a focus on suicide prevention.