Covering Suicide
Chapter 6
Taking suicide reporting recommendations to the next level.
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RESOURCES
The 3rd edition of Mindset includes a more advanced version of the chapter on reporting on suicide, in response to a welcome expansion of scope beyond the reporting of individual incidents. The new chapter should be read first, for the broad rationale it provides for a more nuanced and productive approach to applying standard recommendations.
This section of the website gives more examples of how the advice, developed over many months with input from leading journalists and suicide prevention specialists, might be applied in a variety of situations.
The Forum held a three-hour panel discussion on suicide reporting with delegates to the national conference of the Canadian Association for Suicide Prevention in October 2019, in preparation for advancing our suicide reporting recommendations. A number of video clips from those sessions are available in these support pages. In the first, Renata D'Aliesio, who led the Globe & Mail's team on The Unremembered project that exposed the extent of suicide among Canada's Afghanistan war veterans, and Ioanna Roumeliotis, who had inside access for CBC News: The National to the Toronto Transit Commission during its move away from a longstanding policy of silence about subway suicide, engaged with delegates about how to define responsible reporting.
A rigid one-size-fits-all approach can inhibit important journalism that materially advances the public interest. We do not, on the other hand, advocate for a free-for-all. Rather we advance the principle that, where there is a substantial public good to be achieved through enterprising journalism, that is a significant factor that should be weighed against the potential for harm, with the objective of maximizing the former and minimizing the latter.
This principle may affect different kinds of suicide reporting differently. It is not our intent here to categorize suicide stories and give inflexible recommendations for each. Categorizing is presented only as a useful starting point for ethical consideration.
Select Now From The Menu
Incident Reporting
Individual deaths reported as news stories
Feature Reporting 1
General advice and focus on groups at particular risk.
Feature Reporting 2
Focus on policy and "upstream" issues
Feature Reporting 3
Investigation of possible shortcomings by governments, industries, public authorities or institutions.
Interviewing Survivors
A call for training; links to resources.
Many mental illnesses first show themselves in adolescence or young adulthood. With psychiatric services in short supply and waiting times long, parents who can afford it often consult psychologists or social workers. These are in greater supply, but their fees are not covered by provincial health plans, which don’t consider their services to be medically necessary. They are, however, often effective in dealing with mood disorders in particular. Former Senator Michael Kirby called this a two-tier medicare system. His organization at the time, Partners for Mental Health, was campaigning to bring psychological and social care for young people with mental disorders within provincial health coverage.
On the other side of the coin, some parents may not be familiar with the variety of theories behind alternative therapies, or be able to judge whether such help is appropriate for psychotic illnesses. One such was Susan Inman, a B.C. teacher who sought help for one of her daughters, who developed schizophrenia. She wrote the following article for Mindset:
A Mother’s Story
by Susan Inman
Contributor to Huffington Post and author of
After Her Brain Broke: Helping My Daughter Recover Her Sanity
I never expected to be the parent of someone who developed a psychotic brain disorder. My education had led me to believe that as long as parents are loving, attentive, and affirmative of their children’s unique natures, their children can thrive.
Given these beliefs, I was especially unprepared when our younger adolescent daughter began to develop strange behaviours and began to seriously flounder. My husband asked colleagues in the UBC Faculty of Education for a recommendation for a therapist who could help. We didn’t think to ask about this therapist’s knowledge about psychotic disorders. Only later did we realize that this therapist, with an MA in Counselling Psychology, had trained in one of the numerous programs training mental health clinicians that neither offer nor require science-based curriculum on psychotic illnesses. She knew as little as we did.
Our daughter’s therapist used the psychodynamic theories she’d been trained in and she spent the first years of our daughter’s growing psychotic illness trying to discover the family secret that would explain her deteriorating condition. My memoir details the series of catastrophic events that followed these uninformed assumptions. Our daughter plunged into a two year psychotic episode until we finally connected with the right dose of the right anti-psychotic medication.
Many other parents have let me know about the similar experiences they have had with inadequately trained therapists. Sadly, public education about psychotic disorders has remained basically non-existent in the 13 years since our daughter became psychotic. Nor has there been any effort to ensure that all mental health clinicians receive training about schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, illnesses that the Canadian Psychiatric Association explains are actually brain disorders.
Late in our daughter’s two year profound psychosis, she was evaluated by Vancouver’s St. Paul’s Hospital’s Refractory Psychosis Team. By this point she had lost almost all language and could no longer manage simple everyday tasks like washing her hair or making herself a cup of tea. We later learned that the team considered her to be one of the most ill teenagers that they had ever seen and predicted a grim future.
We did end up working for the past ten years with a Canadian expert on schizophrenia. Our daughter has not only benefitted from her psychiatrist’s cutting edge knowledge, but she’s benefitted from his unusually collaborative relationship with us.
For many years now, our daughter has been very stable and enjoys her life. She benefitted enormously from psycho-education about her illness; the kind of science based education that let her understand, accept, and learn to manage her illness has become rarer within mental health services.
As our daughter stabilized, I began to try to understand the social trends that have had such a devastating impact on her and so many people like her. Once I realized that our daughter has a brain disorder that neuroscience has been investigating, I wanted to try to understand why there is such a perilous gap between what science knows about these illnesses and the practices that are occurring in mental health care. My articles for Huffington Post Canada and other publications document this ongoing investigation.
While some aspects of the situation for people with severe mental illnesses have worsened, there have been some improvements. One of the most hopeful for me is that a growing number of journalists have clearly been educating themselves about these disorders. Even though we don’t have public health agencies offering the necessary public education, it’s possible that parents can now read articles that lead them to make much better decisions than we did.