The Role Of Suicide In The Media

In our society we see a huge stigma around mental health; this can be people with mental health issues, mental health professionals and mental health treatments. This stigma is circulated throughout our society with the help of the media; this includes news media, entertainments media and social media. People with mental health issues are often viewed as dangerous, violent and unpredictable. The portrayals are negative, inaccurate and can cause interpersonal harm to those being stigmatize (Fujioka, 2015.) The media and those who work with the media are shown to be insensitive to topics surrounding mental health and interacting with those who may have mental health symptoms. The media not only effects the public by the types of cases they

It was found, in multiple studies that when the media talked about suicide in a way that was sensationalized or the method of the suicide was explain in detail there was an increase in suicides in the community where the article was published. A separate study was conducted spanning over a 1 year period tracking suicide stories in Australia, through newspapers, television news reports and radio networks. With a total of 4,813 items, half of these reported the suicide method in detail. After this discovery, a set of guidelines call the ‘Reporting Suicide and Mental Illness’ was developed. These guidelines encouraged journalist to stay away from the details of how someone died and include information for those who may need to reach out for help. It is made clear that these guidelines are not about censorship and more about drawing caution to the reporting of sensitive information. After these guidelines were put into place another study was done similar to the first over a year long period and there were significant improvements. There was a drop from 50% to 14% of the items reporting details about the method of the suicide (Pirkis, 2010). These guidelines show to have some effect on the way journalist are reporting and has the ability to keep sensitive information from the public that may accelerate one’s

During the 70’s, there was a sequence of family murder-suicides that were reported in the news. In one of the cases, at the scene of where a mother killed her children then herself, there was a newspaper opened to a story of a similar case that happen a couple days before. A decade later there was a series of suicide by jumping from a parking lot building where it seemed like the later cases copied the first ones. Lastly, there was a report from a mother about her child being abducted. It was later realized that she killed her son. After this there were 5 similar cases in a month and 4 the month after. This is much higher than there average of 1.9 per month over a 10 year period. All of these situations seem like they are copycat suicides and there are reports of an increase in teenage suicides of 6.9% but only .5% in adult suicides after news reports on separate suicides (Goldney, 2001). This raises the question of is it the media who is influencing these suicides by the way they are reporting past suicides or is it the lack of mental health interventions in people who may be showing the signs of a mental health