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Abstract
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Detail, sensationalism, and accounts of the method used are unnecessary and harmful
News coverage of television presenter Caroline Flack’s recent death by suicide once again raises public health concerns about media reporting of suicide. Freedom of the press is one of the fundamental pillars of a democratic society, but is regulation around some aspects of the media reporting of suicide required?
Niederkrotenthaler and colleagues’ systematic review in The BMJ (doi:10.1136/bmj.m575)1 suggests that the answer could be “yes.” The team synthesised findings from 31 studies investigating associations between media reporting of deaths by suicide and population suicide rates. Most studies looked at the reporting of deaths of celebrities by suicide. The phenomenon has been studied in Europe, Asia, North America, and Australia, highlighting the international extent of concerns. Suicide rates increased by 13% (95% confidence interval 8% to 18%) on average in the period (median 28 days) following media reports of the death of a celebrity by suicide.
This effect is substantial. In the United Kingdom, where 6507 people died by suicide in 2018 (542 per month),2 a 13% increase would amount to around 70 additional deaths. In the five months following the death of the international celebrity Robin Williams by suicide, deaths by suicide increased by almost 10% (n=1841) in the United States.3
It could be argued that producing one summary estimate of risk from such a diverse range of studies is misleading. There was marked variation between study findings and evidence of publication bias. Further, any association between the reporting of a celebrity’s death and wider suicide rates will be confounded by the popularity of the celebrity, which influences both the extent of media reporting and the reader’s emotional connection to the death. Even so, the estimate reported by Niederkrotenthaler and colleagues will help give media outlets a clearer sense of the potential effect of their reporting ...
Language: en |