Reference URLs : Guide to Reporting on Suicide

The Science Behind Suicide Contagion

Robin Williams death: How should the media report a suicide?

Suicides After Media Reporting (academic)

Suicide Clusters : A reconsideration

Media suicide coverage debated

Trisha Cook : Media and Suicides

Why doesn’t the media cover suicides often?

Media and Internet Use Is A Predictor Of Suicide In Japan

Whenever there is a suicide reported in the media, the question arises as to whether it is ethical to report suicides at all. What if it inspires copycat suicides? But I think these fears are overblown, and I think the media reporting of suicides is both ethical and impossible to avoid.

The phenomenon of reported suicides inspiring other suicides is know academically as “suicide clusters”, and there is a lot of well respected research as well as thoughtful and professional analyses by people in the media supporting the phenomenon. However,  this conclusion has not gone unchallenged,

The interpretations drawn from this research (assuming the pro-cluster side is valid) are questionable. Even if some people’s chance of committing suicide is elevated by media reports, an equal or greater number of suicides could be prevented by raising awareness about suicide and its warning signs.

So it’s not a matter of whether to report suicides, it’s a matter of how. There exist very sensitive and thoughtful guides about how to report a suicide, and as long as these guidlines are followed, there should be no moral objection to the reporting of suicides.

And in this Internet-saturated era, there is no way to control information, so total suppression is not a option. If the media didn’t report suicides, it would not prevent depressed people from hearing about it. Even in the pre-Internet era, it was problematic. Suicide rips a hole in the social fabric of a community, and that loss is bound to cause an undeniable ripple effect that will do the media’s job quite efficiently.

And then people are left wondering why their local media is “ignoring the story”.

That effect is multiplied beyond all recognition with the advent of Facebook, Twitter, email, and all the rest. The Internet is the most efficient form of social communication ever known, and all it takes is one media outlet, or prominent blogger, or major Twitter account, to share the story of the suicide before any media outlet that doesn’t report it looks like they are deliberately ignoring the story out of callous disrespect for human life.

For these, and many other points I will think of later, I think that it is not only acceptable for the media to report suicides, it is necessary, and even inevitable.