Is suicide reporting in Indian newspapers responsible? A study from Rajasthan
Introduction
Suicide is a public health problem of increasing magnitude. WHO reported that over one million deaths worldwide are due to suicide and each death impacts at least six other people (WHO, 2008). The factors related to suicide are complex and some of them poorly understood, but one factor that has consistently been shown to influence suicidal behaviour is media reporting (Pikris and Blood, 2010). Irresponsible reporting by the media can lead to imitative suicidal behaviour (Frey et al., 1995). The imitative suicidal behaviour varies with time (Bollen and Phillips, 1982), amount and prominence of coverage, sensational coverage with description of method used (Etzersdorfer et al., 2004), celebrity suicide reporting(Cheng et al., 2007).On the other hand there is evidence that educative and responsible reporting can be a preventive measure (Niederkrotenthaler et al., 2010). Keeping in mind the scientific data available in this regard, the World Health Organization delineated guidelines for responsible media reporting of suicide (WHO, 2008).
There are limited Indian studies that have examined the whether suicide reporting in the print media follows the WHO guidelines. This study aims to fill this gap.
Section snippets
Aims and objectives
- 1.
To examine if Indian newspapers follow the WHO guidelines for responsible suicide reporting.
- 2.
To examine if there are differences in style of reporting between local and national newspapers.
- 3.
To examine if there are differences in style of reporting between English and Hindi newspapers.
Methodology
The study was conducted on ten newspaper publications that were circulated in Jaipur, India from 1st October, 2014 to 31st December, 2014. Out of these ten newspapers, five were national and five regional newspapers. We tried to classify the newspapers as regional or national on the basis of following points:
- a.
The extent of circulation: The newspapers we classified as regional had circulation only in the state of Rajasthan or only in Jaipur district. This distinction however is blurred because of
Results
Out of 920 newspapers screened during the study period, 557 news items related to suicide were found. Thus, on an average a newspaper publishes one news item related to suicide every other day.
Table 1 shows the number of news items related to suicide published in each newspaper.
It can be seen that there is a large variation in the number of news items related to suicide that find publication in different newspapers. English language, national dailies published the least number of news items
Discussion
Many studies have concluded that irresponsible media reporting of suicide can lead to imitative suicide behaviour (Phillips, 1974, Stack, 2000). The present study was conducted to study suicide reporting patterns in Indian newspapers. It was observed that the frequency of news report pertaining to suicide in the present study is higher than those reported from a study conducted in Kerala, India (Ramadas and Kuttichira, 2011).
The most important aspect of media reporting associated with increased
Ethical considerations
The findings of the study were also communicated to the publishers of individual newspapers along with a copy of the WHO guidelines on suicide reporting.
References (11)
- et al.
Imitative suicides: a national study of the effects of television news stories
Am. Sociol. Rev.
(1982) - et al.
The influence of media reporting of the suicide of a celebrity on suicide rates: a population-based study
Int. J. Epidemiol.
(2007) - et al.
A dose-response relationship between imitational suicides and newspaper distribution
Arch. Suicide Res.: Off. J. Int. Acad. Suicide Res.
(2004) - et al.
Suicide reporting in Swiss print media: responsible or irresponsible?
Eur. J. Public Health
(1995) - et al.
Role of media reports in completed and prevented suicide: werther v. Papageno effects
Br. J. Psychiatry: J. Mental Sci.
(2010)
Cited by (19)
The national suicide prevention strategy in India: context and considerations for urgent action
2022, The Lancet PsychiatryCitation Excerpt :Research shows that suicide reporting in the Indian press is short, explicit, repetitive, simplistic, and potentially harmful.47 Disclosure of the name of the deceased and method of suicide with little mention of suicide prevention services is routine in many English language newspapers.52–54 The Indian media is more likely to report deaths by suicide of people of higher social status and of those population groups with whom their core audience has a higher affiliation, such as students and farmers.55
Newspaper reporting of suicide news in a high suicide burden state in India: Is it compliant with international reporting guidelines?
2021, Asian Journal of PsychiatryCitation Excerpt :These findings from an Indian state with advanced social development indicators are probably reflective of media reporting practices in India and suggest a need for remedial action. Our findings are broadly consistent with the few studies on media reporting of suicide and self-harm available from India (Armstrong et al., 2018; Chandra et al., 2014; Jain and Kumar, 2016; Menon et al., 2020; Kar et al., 2021) and Asia (Arafat et al., 2020a, 2020b; Brandt Sørensen et al., 2019; Nisa et al., 2020) though elsewhere, media reporting quality appears to be improving (McTernan et al., 2018; Pirkis et al., 2002). We found that the use of sensationalized and detailed language to describe the details of the person, such as name (93.9 %) and event, such as method of suicide (93.1 %), were very common.
Mental health issues mediate social media use in rumors: Implication for media based mental health literacy
2020, Asian Journal of PsychiatryQuality of media reporting of suicidal behaviors in South-East Asia
2020, Neurology Psychiatry and Brain ResearchCitation Excerpt :Detail characteristics of studies are presented in Table 1. The comparison better the vernacular and the English news reports have been addressed in India (Chandra, Doraiswamy, Padmanabh, & Philip, 2014; Jain & Kumar, 2016), few variations have been noted in other studies (Arafat, Khan, Niederkrotenthaler, Ueda, & Armstrong, 2020; Armstrong et al., 2018; Brandt Sørensen et al., 2019). Researched domains and existing research gaps of the countries have been mentioned in Table 2 and the legal status, country-specific suicide reporting media guidelines and degree of adherence have been mentioned in Table 3.