Selfie Death Statistics Revealed

Most of us laugh at the selfie addicts, but there is no doubt that there are enough of them out there. In fact, the word selfie is mentioned in 365,000 facebook posts and 150,000 tweets each week alone and Instagram has over 50 million results when searching for the hashtag. That’s quite impressive, but there’s also a sad statistic when it comes to selfies and that is the one on selfie-related deaths.

With so many selfies taken every day, people are looking for that special one that will set them apart from the rest. They hang from cliffs, pose next to wild animals, and play chicken with oncoming trains. Sometimes they sadly don’t survive the attempts and become a statistical number. There hasn’t really been any general collection of these deaths up until now  and Priceonomics set out to change that. They went through three years of news archives and compiled every reported instance of a selfie-related death into a new report.

So let us get right to the numbers, at least those known to us. There can be a lot of selfie-related deaths that haven’t been reported as such. In short, 49 people have died while attempting to photograph themselves since 2014, the average age of the victims is 21 years old, and 75% of them are male.

Now, we should probably make it clear that it isn’t the selfie themselves that kill people. As far as I know, no one has died from taking their own photo yet and I don’t think anyone has managed to impale themselves on their selfie stick either. It is rather the lack of focus and dangerous places that are picked for the selfies that are the reason for the deaths. The most common reasons were falls from heights as well as drowning. Everyone should know to stay away from trains, but it looks like quite a few don’t know to do that either.

There is a clear picture of where it’s most dangerous to take selfies when we take a look at the location statistics. India is clearly ahead with 19 reported fatalities while Russia comes in on a second place with just seven deaths.

Last year it was 28 people alone that died as the result of their selfie addiction which in itself actually isn’t that much. More than double die from bee and wasp stings each year and it was also reported that up to 150 people die from falling coconuts each year. That puts it a little into perspective.

Still, you should use caution and not take unnecessary risks when you go for those special photographic memories. Keep in mind that no photo is worth your life, no matter how spectacular it might be. The below warning signs were made by a Russian site and they might be worth imprinting to memory.