Reporting on suicides calls for more sensitivity, says panel

Bengaluru: Going beyond reporting suicide sensitively, it is time for media houses to also rethink whether all incidents of suicide need to be reported as news.

This was one of the many statements made at a symposium in Nimhans, titled ‘Changing the Narrative: Role of Responsible Media Reporting in Suicide Prevention’ on Saturday. The symposium was organized by the Department of Mental Health Education, in collaboration with the Department of Psychiatry, Nimhans, and the Indian Psychiatric Society (Karnataka Chapter) to observe World Suicide Prevention Month 2024.

Dr. Pratima Murthy, director and senior psychiatry professor at Nimhans, highlighted the need for media professionals not to oversimplify the causes of deaths by suicide to one factor, but rather to attempt to understand the various factors at play.

“There are immediate problems, such as examinations, loss of a love affair, but you might also see poverty, discrimination, financial difficulties, intergenerational trauma, substance use, stress that might be in the background under which these attempts occur,” she said.

Incidents of self-harm and attempts to die by suicide need to be followed up on carefully by mental health professionals because the chances of people attempting to self-harm goes up by 30% within a year of their first attempt, she added.

In this context, Dr Rajani Parthasarathy, deputy director, mental health, state health department, emphasised the need for hospitals to establish self-harm registries and for mental health professionals to follow up on people.

“One way of reporting on suicide is to highlight stories of survivors to fill people with hope and remind them that attempts of self-harm and suicide are not the answer to extreme stressful situations,” she said.

Sharing best practices for reporting on suicide, which include avoiding sensationalisation, descriptive details on the incident and method, and using “death by suicide” instead of “commit”, Manoj Chandran, CMO, MANAH Wellness, called on media professionals to rethink if suicides must be reported as news.