The reason for me writing this piece about suicide and media influence is simple. These days every now and then we hear about successful suicidal attempts being carried out in Maldives. We have heard from sources of attempted but not successful suicidal incidents in Maafushi jail before. Even if it is not a Maldivian who has become a victim of suicide, these incidences are being overly covered and exaggerated in the Maldivian media with great dramatic euphoria and detail and i must say sadly with lots of enthusiasm and wickedness. It is as if everyone wants to know who is the “young girl” who hanged or jumped from the balcony of a 10 floor building. As they say a story with blood and death is always a good story, a suicide story never fails to impress the readers. There is this vibe and keeness after all.

After the tsunami, these reportings have hyped up in intensity. Is it something the media should report or be sensitive about? Should we report on how these individuals took their lives or not? Or is there a milder and more responsible way of doing it?

I would describe the recent successful suicidal attempts in Maldives as copycat incidences where these people have heard about others taking their lives by a certain method (hanging) from the media and then acting on that. Indeed, what a powerful tool media can be.

Suicidal process involves 4 main stages.

A thought

A plan

A mean

Acting

Many of these suicidal cases might not have actually gone past the thinking stage until they have heard about the media reportings on the recent suicides. These media reportings might have given them a mean, a plan or the initiative to act of ending their precious life after all.

Many would not have noticed or read about the influence of media as a fascilitator, encouraging or acting as a stimuli for “vulnerable” people FINDING ways to end their lives by reporting about such individual incidences. But it is a widely known phenomenon and a fact, if you may want to call it that way.

 

This paper reports a field experiment concerning mass-media and suicide. After the implementation of the subway system in Vienna in 1978, it became increasingly acceptable as means to commit suicide, with the suicide rates showing a sharp increase. This and the fact that the mass-media reported about these events in a very dramatic way, lead to the formation of a study-group of the Austrian Association for Suicide Prevention (ÖVSKK), which developed media guidelines and launched a media campaign in mid-1987.

You can get the article from here.

Reporting and portrayal of suicidal behaviour in the media may have potentially negative influences and facilitate suicidal acts by people exposed to such stimuli. Recent systematic reviews by others and ourselves (unpublished) have found overwhelming evidence for such effects.

Continue reading from BMJ.

Following a series of complaints about media coverage of suicide in the UK, PressWise undertook research into journalism codes of conduct and training on the issue.

Continue reading from presswise.org.

A national panel of experts in behavioral science, suicide, and the media as developed specific recommendations for the media on how to report acts of suicide. These recommendations are intended both to help reduce the copycat or contagion effect that media coverage of suicide may produce and also to provide accurate and helpful information to the public about suicide.

Continue reading from American Foundation for Suicide Prevention.

We have been hearing about a Maldives press law in recent times with no solid outcomes from all the talks and doings as usual. That is nothing new.

It wasnt very long ago when we heard about a Paul Robinson from University of Pennsylvania trying to draft a penal code for us.

One example of how the laws will change deals with suicide. The current Maldivian law lacks any information on suicide so the new laws will add a provision on this. They looked to the Koran, which says not to commit suicide and to Muslim jurists who have made rulings against it as well. They also looked to the ALI penal code, which criminalizes suicide.

I wish if there were more support services available for the tsunami victims. It is really frustrating and sad to see that no real campaigns are being carried to HELP the people who are the most vulnerable in our society.