For the Media

Guide for Journalists:

The Tennessee Suicide Prevention Network highly endorses Recommendations for Reporting on Suicide, a one-pager that provides guidance for covering suicide incidents that encourages help-seeking and does not encourage contagion effects.

These recommendations were developed by leading experts in suicide prevention and in collaboration with several international suicide prevention and public health organizations, schools of journalism, media organizations and key journalists as well as Internet safety experts. The recommendations are based on more than 50 international studies on suicide contagion.

TSPN also suggests the reporting recommendations provided by the American Association of Suicidology, the Dart Center for Journalism and Trauma, and the "For the Press" section of the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline's media resource page.

Mass shootings frequently involve the shooter taking their own lives or being killed by the police in what is commonly referred to as "suicide by cop". Recommendations for reporting on mass shootings are available at reportingonmassshootings.org.

Samaritans, which provides suicide prevention and crisis response services in the United Kingdom and Ireland, offers a one-pager with specific recommendations for reporting on murder-suicides.

Help for journalists who report suicidal death
The media can play a powerful role in educating the public about suicide prevention, its causes and warning signs, trends in suicide rates, helping resources, and recent treatment advances. They can also highlight how to prevent suicide and how to help someone who is feeling suicidal.

However, such stories also have the potential to do harm.

These recommendations can help prevent media related “suicide contagion” or “copycat” suicides.

Minimize coverage of suicide and avoid sensationalism.

• Avoid normalizing, romanticizing or idealizing suicide. Prominent coverage or dramatizing suicide through descriptions or pictures may encourage persons at risk to see suicide as a way of getting attention or retaliation.
• Avoid details or pictures of the method, location, site or the funeral. Such details may encourage vulnerable individuals to imitate it.
• Avoid presenting suicide as the inexplicable act of an otherwise promising, healthy or high-achieving person to discourage identification with the victim. Reports of community expression of grief should also be minimized.
• Using adolescents on TV or in print media to tell stories of their suicide attempts may be harmful and may encourage other vulnerable young people to seek attention in this way.
• Describe the deceased as having “died by suicide” rather than as “a suicide” or having “committed suicide.” The latter two expressions reduce the person to the mode of death or connote criminal or sinful behavior.
  
  

Language

• Referring to “non-fatal” suicide attempts is preferable to using terms such as “unsuccessful” or “failed” suicide attempts.
• Referring to a “rise” in suicide rates is usually more accurate than calling such a rise an “epidemic.”
• Avoid describing a suicide as unexplainable (e.g. “He had everything going for him.”), romanticized (e.g. “We want to be together for all eternity.”) or simplistic (e.g. “Boy commits suicide because he has to wear braces.”).
  
  

Include the following “Warning Signs’ and “How to Help” lists in a sidebar:

Warning Signs

• Threats of suicide or statements revealing a desire to die.
• Previous suicide attempts or self harm.
• Depression (crying, changes in sleeping/eating patterns, hopelessness, loss of interest in hobbies/activities).
• Final arrangements (e.g. giving away prized possessions).
• Drastic changes in personality or behavior.
  
  

How to Help

• Keep calm and take it seriously. Do not minimize the threat or assume it is a joke or a way of getting attention.
• Discuss suicide openly and directly.
• Listen. Show your support and concern.
• If possible, remove objects such as guns or pills that could be used to inflict self harm.
• Get professional help.

Recommendations to reduce the contagion risk:

• Print the story on an inside page whenever possible.
• Print the story below the fold
• Avoid the word “suicide” in the headline.
• Avoid printing a photo of the person who died by suicide.
• Present alternatives to suicide (e.g. calling a suicide prevention center, obtaining counseling, etc.)
• When possible, present examples of positive outcomes of people in suicidal crises.
• List helpful community resources such as the Crisis Intervention Center, Mental Health Association, community mental health centers, etc.

Interviewing Surviving Relatives and Friends:

• If interviewing grieving family members or friends is necessary, exercise caution. During the period immediately after a death by suicide, those left behind have difficulty understanding what happened: responses may be extreme, problems may be minimized and motives may be complicated.
• Accounts based upon initial reactions are often unreliable. In the first shocked reaction, friends and family may find a loved one’s death by suicide inexplicable or they may deny that there were warning signs.
• Some informants may suggest that a particular individual such as a family member, a school, or a health service provider in some way played a role in the victim’s death by suicide. However, there are usually multiple causes for suicide.

These guidelines were developed by the World Health Organization, the Office of the Surgeon General, the Centers for Disease Control, the American Association of Suicidology and others.

Also see “Recommendations for Reporting on Suicide”, a short handout from the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline summarizing the above points.

TSPN periodically sends out press releases promoting agency events and commenting on suicide-related phenomena in the news. These press releases are often picked up by local newspapers, television stations, and radio stations, helping the Network raise awareness about the problem of suicide in Tennessee and what TSPN is doing to prevent it.