Suicide reports in the news – impact of Chief Coroner's call to open up suicide reporting

ABSTRACT

Aim: In 2010, the then Chief Coroner called for an opening up of suicide reporting in the press. We aimed to discover if this controversial action influenced the nature and extent of reporting of individual suicide cases in the newsprint media.

Method: A Factiva search of news reports from high circulation newspapers was conducted over four years. We counted the number of news reports of individual suicides and examined any mention of demographics, methods, location and contributing factors.

Results: We retrieved 291 individual suicide reports, 161 before and 130 after the Chief Coroners’ call. Reporting was more detailed after the call, with increased reporting of demographics, contributing factors and methods but less reporting of location. Most of these differences did not reach statistical significance.

Conclusion: The press did not appear to take the action of the Chief Coroner as a licence to report more frequently on individual suicide cases.

KEYWORDS:

• Suicide
• reporting
• news
• media
• coroner

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This research was funded by a University of Otago Research Grant.