In 2009, Lawrence Kutner, a character on television's House, M.D., unexpectedly committed suicide. A Facebook memorial group was created shortly thereafter in memory of the fictional character. A thematic analysis of fan postings on Kutner's Facebook memorial page revealed evidence of people experiencing parasocial grief as they displayed emotional expressions of grief, reminisced, and advocated for Kutner. Through thematic analysis, we discovered that elements of parasocial relationships, particularly parasocial breakups, were apparent as the members posted evidence of their grief over the loss of a television character. Moreover, this parasocial grief is likely to be disenfranchised, as the death of a television character is typically not recognized by others as a legitimate loss. This study also highlighted the role of social media as an outlet for grief as well as revealed confusion between fiction and reality resulting from social media.
This research output has an Altmetric Attention Score of 85. This is our high-level measure of the quality and quantity of online attention that it has received. This Attention Score, as well as the ranking and number of research outputs shown below, was calculated when the research output was last mentioned on 28 September 2026.
All research outputs
#635,690
of 34,414,017 outputs
Outputs from OMEGA - Journal of Death and Dying
#25
of 1,018 outputs
Outputs of similar age
#6,221
of 302,549 outputs
Outputs of similar age from OMEGA - Journal of Death and Dying
#1
of 3 outputs
Altmetric has tracked 34,414,017 research outputs across all sources so far. Compared to these this one has done particularly well and is in the 98th percentile: it's in the top 5% of all research outputs ever tracked by Altmetric.
So far Altmetric has tracked 1,018 research outputs from this source. They typically receive a lot more attention than average, with a mean Attention Score of 12.3. This one has done particularly well, scoring higher than 97% of its peers.
Older research outputs will score higher simply because they've had more time to accumulate mentions. To account for age we can compare this Altmetric Attention Score to the 302,549 tracked outputs that were published within six weeks on either side of this one in any source. This one has done particularly well, scoring higher than 97% of its contemporaries.
We're also able to compare this research output to 3 others from the same source and published within six weeks on either side of this one. This one has scored higher than all of them
