The Role of the Narrative in Educative Suicide Awareness Materials: A Randomized Controlled Trial

ABSTRACT

There has been a debate about the suitability of different narratives in educative suicide prevention materials. Whereas some suicide prevention experts recommend raising awareness of suicide by highlighting its prevalence, others argue that this approach may normalize suicide and advocate focusing on help resources instead. Unfortunately, empirical evidence regarding this question is lacking. This randomized controlled trial aimed to test the impact of educative news articles that conveyed different narratives of suicide prevention. One article focused on the prevalence of suicide, one article highlighted professional help resources, and one article emphasized on how everyone can help to prevent suicide. We randomized n = 334 participants to read either one of these three articles or an article unrelated to suicide. Data on suicidal ideation, stigmatizing attitudes toward suicidal individuals, attitudes toward suicide prevention, and help-seeking intentions were collected with questionnaires, and implicit measures were used to assess participants’ mental accessibility of concepts related to suicide and suicide prevention. Participants exposed to the article highlighting the high prevalence of suicide tended to show a higher accessibility of potentially detrimental cognitive concepts related to suicide. In contrast, the accessibility of the concept of “helping” and that “suicide is preventable” was higher in participants’ memory when exposed to materials focusing on help. It seems that the impact of educative suicide awareness materials on readers’ access to suicide- and suicide-prevention-related concepts in memory varied depending on the narrative featured in the article.

Acknowledgments

Data was collected by PR for his master thesis at the Medical University of Vienna.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Data availability statement

The data set can be obtained within reasonable request from the corresponding author.

Supplementary data

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/10410236.2023.2167580

Additional information

Funding

The author(s) reported there is no funding associated with the work featured in this article.