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by Nadira Gunatilleke

Most of Sinhala language newspapers do not consider feelings of relatives of victims when publishing suicide cases. The same news reports publish descriptions of suicide methods not acknowledging the complexities of suicidal behaviour. Most of the time the news reports rarely provide information about where help and advice can be found, admitted several local journalists who took part in a workshop on 'Suicide sensitive journalism' held in Colombo recently.

During the workshop the participants raised a number of questions on different styles used by Sinhala language newspapers to report suicide cases. Several Sinhala reports which carried different types of suicide cases were examined during the workshop. A study done by the Centre for Policy Alternatives (CPA) on the same subject was also presented to the journalists to develop a `Suicide-sensitive journalism handbook'.

According to the study, the tendency towards an extreme sensationalism when reporting is evident. Articles which deal with the complex issues surrounding suicides are extremely rare. Every article on suicide in the newspapers monitored clearly stated the method used in the particular suicide. In fact there seems to be a tendency to be as clear as possible when reporting the method. Mainstream media show no interest in exploring the series of events that led to the suicide but instead explain the suicide as a result of a single event or at best a simplistic chain of events, the report says.

The coroner's reports or police reports are the primary sources of information for media reports on suicide. It is almost impossible to find any article in the mainstream media reporting suicides that goes beyond these primary sources of information and examines the cause for the suicide in an analytical perspective. Another common phenomenon are headlines that take suicides lightly - mainstream media shows a tendency to downplay the seriousness of suicides.

This in turn is a stark reminder of the incapacity of mainstream media to sensitively report suicides, says the report.

According to the same findings many of the reports clearly explain the method used in the suicide or suicide attempt. The name of the pesticide, the location, the detailed method, the ingredients of a fatal concoction are all laid bare, with little or no understanding of the effect of such reporting. These details could have easily been taken out of the reports.

Another clear tendency is for articles on suicides to report the ostensible cause and method in the headline itself. This has the inadvertent and undesirable effect of promoting suicide as a solution to certain problems. For instance `man commits suicide because his wife left him', woman commits suicide because husband abuses her', 'student takes cyanide and dies because her friends got to know about her secret love affair', `mother kills child and then takes poison herself', `lover takes poison after argument'.

Sensationalism, fabrication of true events, male centric perspective, false heroism, erroneous portrayal of love, lack of sensitivity to victims or the families of the victims, no exploration of alternatives and suicide portrayed as solution to certain problems and an act of martyrdom are some of the salient points that were observed in two suicide cases (where a boy killed his girlfriend, her father and killed himself and a story of a woman who killed herself inside Inland Fisheries Department) appeared in one of the leading Sinhala medium newspaper recently.

According to some useful guidelines developed by the PressWise Trust with the contribution of journalists, sensitive reporting includes consideration for the feelings of relatives, avoiding detailed descriptions of suicide methods, acknowledging the complexities of suicidal behaviour, providing information about where help and advice can be found, acknowledging that sudden death creates problems for family and friends. The same guidelines say that publicising details of suicide methods can encourage imitation. It is also recommended to avoid speculation, especially about `celebrity suicides'.

The media can play a powerful role in educating the public about suicide prevention. Stories about suicide can inform readers and viewers about the likely causes of suicide, its warning signs, trends in suicide rates, and recent treatment advances. They can also highlight opportunities to prevent suicide. Media stories about individual deaths by suicide may be newsworthy and need to be covered, but they also have the potential to do harm.

Implementation of recommendations for media coverage of suicide has been shown to decrease suicide rates.

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