5th World Conference of Science Journalists

PRODUCER/CHAIR: Jacinta Miller,

SPEAKERS: Jaelea Skehan, Jane Pirkis, Steve Waldon

SESSION REPORT: Sensationalist or sensitive?

By Christine Dell’Amore

Suicides should appear in the media as a way to increase understanding of mental illness, but journalists should be cautious in how they portray them, experts said Thursday.

Several health organizations worldwide, including one in Australia, provide journalists with media guidelines for reporting on suicide and mental health.

The guidelines are mostly universal – for example, they suggest reporters avoid glamorizing suicide and describing the method of death in detail. (Giving details could encourage readers to replicate the method themselves, a phenomenon called “The Werther Effect.”)

Jane Pirkis of the University of Melbourne studies suicide coverage in the media. In 2000, she began a Media Monitoring Project, which reviewed all Australian TV, newspaper and radio reports for one year and retrieved 4,813 references to suicide.

Once she compared this to national suicide statistics, only 1 percent of suicides were reported in the media — a surprising find, Pirkis told a panel at the World Conference of Science Journalists in Melbourne.

On balance, most of the reporting was sensitive and accurate — for instance, the word suicide was not often used in the headline, and few reporters tried to interview the bereaved against their will. However, many of the stories could have been improved by mentioning suicides’ link to mental illness — depression is the No. 1 risk factor for suicide — and printing information on helplines at the bottom of the article.

Pirkis is now six months into a follow-up study, in which she hopes to find a correlation between reporting well on suicide and a reporter’s knowledge of the media guidelines. The guidelines are distributed to all Australian media outlets, but it’s unknown how many in the media actually refer to them.

For most Australians, the media is the only source of information on mental health and suicide, said Jaelea Skehan, program manager for the National Mindframe Media and Mental Health Project at the Hunter Institute of Mental Health.

The Australian Press Council has deemed suicide a matter of legitimate public interest — and so as long as suicide remains a front-page story, journalists must be careful in how they approach it, Skehan said.

Steve Waldron, a writer for “The Age,” ended the panel with an account of his personal experiences writing about the suicides of a friend and a co-worker. His stories brought up a dilemma over where media responsibility begins and ends, he said.

Although Waldron has won awards for his reporting on suicide, he still wondered if he was “trading in on other peoples’ grief.”