Suicide Reporting

A Council submission for the second edition of the Media Resource Kit on Suicide Reporting.

The Australian Press Council consulted its Constituent Bodies, the mainstream print publishers and publishers' associations, in 1997 and put together a 'focus group' of senior journalists representing John Fairfax Publications, News Limited, AAP, Country Press and Australian Consolidated Press.

This group strongly recommended that the "public interest" should be the criterion of responsible reporting of suicide-related issues. The Council, believing that freedom of the press is the freedom of the public to be informed, says that the media have a responsibility appropriately to inform the public on important issues such as suicide prevention, treatment of mental illness, causes of depression, lack of government funding etc. All of this entails some reporting of suicide-related issues.

These journalists do not subscribe to the assumption that the reporting of suicide, particularly youth suicide, is ipso facto bad and could itself be a causative factor in subsequent suicides. The Council noted three key matters which should be taken into account before such blanket assumptions are baldly stated as fact in any Resource Kit.

The Link

The thinking behind the current attitude of some mental health professionals and sections of the bureaucracy to the reporting of suicide and suicide-related matters is predicated on the hypothesis that reporting of suicide leads to increased suicides is a fact. The Press Council convened a round-table seminar between media professionals, mental health professionals and interested consumer and counselling services in April 1996. At that seminar, media professionals and some suicide counsellors challenged this key hypothesis.

In recent times, people like Senator Nick Sherry have called for greater, not lesser, coverage of the issues, and the causes of suicide, further challenging the 'link' hypothesis.

The literature on the statistical linkage between reporting and suicide is not as clear-cut as the assertion of the hypothesis suggests. For example, the Hassan analysis, the only Australian study creating such a link, is tenuous at best. As noted at the seminar, his conclusions are based on a statistically significant link between the number of reported suicides from all around Australia in the three days immediately following reports of suicides in two newspapers, The Age, Melbourne, and The Sydney Morning Herald. Whether the result he achieved demonstrates a linkage (and, indeed, a causal linkage) has been questioned. Further, youth readership of newspapers is increasingly small. Why then should newspaper reports be seen as causing increased suicide among youth?

The reliance on these statistical links raises two issues: there appears to be no qualitative material that would support the quantitative research; and there is a certain tendency for the statistical model to arrive at the desired answer. For example, has anyone used their statistical models to determine whether there is a statistically significant increase in the suicide rate in any section of the community in the three days before a newspaper report? It may be that the increase noted by Hassan and others reflects causes other than media reports. An example: a cluster of suicides in Bundanoon, a NSW provincial town, seemed to be linked by the common friendship among a group of men of various ages. However, in the sort of statistical model used in an attempt to establish a causal link, any Sydney Morning Herald report of an early death in that group would be taken as another significant statistic, without reference to the other possible causes of the suicide. In fact, the reporting in The Sydney Morning Herald of this incident (24 September and 27 September 1997) appeared to have ended the cycle of suicide in Bundanoon. It may be that the cluster ended for other reasons. Equally, suicides in the days following the appearance of reports in newspapers may have other causes.

The UK Samaritans' recently published booklet, Media Guidelines on Portrayal of Suicide, gives both a case for and a case against the link between reporting and increased suicide. It cites qualitative studies carried out in the UK after two television portrayals of suicide neither of which found evidence that the portrayal was a causative factor in subsequent failed suicide attempts (even by the same method).

Celebrity

If a hypothesis is to be useful it should serve as a predictor of behaviour in certain circumstances. For example, it should follow from the oft-stated assertion that the reporting of celebrity suicide is particularly likely to lead to "copycat" attempts, that the blanket coverage of the suicide of Kurt Cobain would lead to a cluster of similar or imitative suicides. In fact, the reporting seems to have had quite the opposite effect because, inter alia, it included the strong denunciation of the suicide on youth-oriented media such as MTV and Triple-J. (Reporting, in Australia, of the Michael Hutchence suicide also appeared not to have led to the predicted cluster.) The assertion about celebrity suicide reporting does not appear to be borne out by the most celebrated such reporting in recent years, and is contradicted to some extent by published research.

An Ameliorative Effect?

The reporting of suicide, far from leading solely to the increase in the rate of suicide, may indeed have an ameliorative effect. Mental heath experts agree that appropriate reporting can lead to improved "mental health literacy" and to the promotion of mental health services but fail to see that this contradicts the assertions of a negative impact from any reporting of suicide or suicide-related stories.

A recent Federal government report appears to call for greater, not less, reporting of suicide-related stories. The assertions made by Dr Brendan Nelson, the chair of the reporting group, were that youth health and education services need to be more aware of the suicide problem and, implicitly, that this matter needs to be aired publicly. Sen. Sherry's recent remarks reinforced this view.

The Council noted two particular cases which seem to contradict the assertion that reporting of suicide-related matters is bad and to be avoided. The reporting in 1991-2 by the Brisbane Sunday Mail of the incidence of suicides from the Gateway Bridge led directly to steps being taken which reduced the use of that structure for suicide. In August 1992 the Sunday Herald Sun reported on an alarming cluster of suicides in Kyneton. The township became the centre of media attention and, as a result of the newspaper coverage, a public meeting was held to discuss the issue. Rather than leading to further suicides, the report seems to have had an ameliorative effect as demonstrated by a follow-up report in February 1994.

Recommendation

The conclusion in the Samaritans' Media Guidelines, referred to above, to the section on "Copycat suicides and media reporting" is worth quoting:

There is conflicting evidence on the effect of the media's treatment of suicide on suicide rates in the overall population, but experts do feel that an effect exists, particularly in individual cases and the young are especially susceptible.

Although the evidence is conflicting, and in many cases lacking, there is cause for concern that inappropriate depiction of suicide can influence the attitudes and behaviour of the audience.

Equally, it is clear that positive explanation of the issue in a sensitive way can help to educate and destigmatise the issue of suicide.

Suicide is a legitimate topic for serious discussion in the media, like other mental health issues. However, the presentation of it should be done with great care.

The Council's group of journalists urged that any guidelines on the reporting of suicide should present a similarly balanced view of what the issues are. They should note that there is some statistically significant evidence for a link between reporting and "copycat" suicide but that that link is by no means conclusively shown. Any Resource Kit should also emphasise that responsible reporting of suicide and suicide-related issues can have a beneficial effect and that the emphasis in any guidelines on reporting of suicide should not be prescriptive nor start from a presumption of harm. Guidelines should note that the emphasis should always be on appropriate and responsible reporting

Contact List

Of far greater benefit to journalists in regional and rural Australia would be an updated list of contacts among mental health professionals, counselling services and health consumer groups which could be accessed by journalists in non-metropolitan areas, and those working for smaller organisations. Such a contact list, which should ideally be maintained on an Internet site, would provide those journalists who need to report on suicides and suicide-related matters access to expert opinion on the content of their material and on references to counselling and other services available in the local area. The Council's 'focus group' thought that such a contact list, maintained and updated regularly, and widely publicised, would be more beneficial to responsible reporting than any 'motherhood' statements or guidelines.

[Editor's Note: This submission is similar in content to a previous submission made in early 1998 and printed in the February 1998 APC News.

The Council's Press Release No 246 on the reporting of suicide, the current "guideline" issued by the Council to the press on this subject.

Jack R Herman

see also

• February 1998 article on suicide reporting
  
• Reporting of Suicide
  A report on a roundtable convened by the Council
  
• Dr Graham Martin on responsible reporting

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