Modelling Suicide‐Related Communication Dynamics: A Socio‐Cybernetic Framework for Governance

ABSTRACT Suicide‐related phenomena (SPS) are often approached through individual‐level risk factors or moral framings, yet their population‐level dynamics depend critically on how ‘suicide’ becomes observable, circulates and is governed across functionally differentiated systems. We develop a testable socio‐cybernetic framework that models SPS as a cross‐system communicative perturbation whose effects are shaped by selection conditions in media, platforms and care systems. First, we reconceptualise Werther and Papageno not as psychological or moral labels but as second‐order semantic regimes of re‐entry that modulate the probability that suicide‐related communications are reintroduced, amplified or stabilised. Second, we operationalise these regimes through a compact coding scheme (W1–W5/P1–P5) and represent the media field as an exposure‐weighted mixture, enabling linkage between semantic content and measurable reach and prominence. Third, we integrate platform governance signals and care absorptive capacity as interacting conditions that determine whether protective communication translates into sustained help‐seeking and continuity of care or degrades under bottlenecks. The framework yields directional, time‐windowed hypotheses and motivates an evaluation standard combining interrupted time‐series estimation with distributed lags and calibrated simulation for designing pulse‐based, multichannel governance portfolios under Ashby's requisite variety. By making explicit what is specified, what is operationalised and how it can be evaluated, the model provides an integrative basis for studying and governing suicide‐related communication dynamics across media, platforms and institutional response capacity.