Suicide: Feature Reporting 1
All features about suicide should have a strong public interest orientation, which can be weighed in the balance with any general recommendations that, followed rigidly, might threaten to hamstring the project. Discarding such recommendations altogether, however, is not an ethical option.
The question, rather, should be to what extent the concern behind them can be taken into account without negating the point of the piece – destroying the good it may do. The answer will likely vary with the circumstances, the objective of the piece, and the extent to which the work breaks new ground. A feature which draws further attention to a situation already exposed by others can still deliver incremental benefits; but one that expands the scope or examines new remedies is likely to have more potential for public good, tending to justify greater latitude.
Looking for examples of how others have dealt with similar problems, and discussing applicability to the case at hand, should be part of the process of determining the most responsible path to take in any particular case.
Renata D'Aliesio, now a deputy editor at The Globe and Mail, was the lead reporter on the paper's ground-breaking and influential Unremembered series about suicide among Canada's Afghanistan war veterans. Taking part in a Forum keynote at the 2019 national conference of the Canadian Association for Suicide Prevention (CASP), she described the process by which the team arrived at its own guidelines for the series:
FEATURES ABOUT GROUPS AT PARTICULAR RISK:
The Unremembered, which won multiple awards and led to significant policy changes, is one example of in-depth reporting focused on a group of people at particular risk of suicide because of shared circumstances. Others examples include first responders, some - but not all - Indigenous people, people who work in a variety of hazardous or isolated conditions, gun-owners and so on. Whatever the target group, the process followed by the Globe and Mail team is a good starting point.
These pieces often start with a thoughtful journalist or documentary-maker observing a problem in the making and asking: "What's the likely consequence of this down the road?" That was, indeed, the seed for The Unremembered, as Renata D'Aliesio told the CASP conference:
Omar Mouallem, an Edmonton-based freelance writer, journalist and documentary filmmaker, has spent five years largely focused on mental health problems and suicide among workers in Alberta's oil patch, affected by the downturn in their industry. Given their macho image, he expected to face considerable obstacles. The reality, he found, proved quite different.
While excellent work has thrown light on certain groups at particular risk, there is still much more work to be done, especially among demographics not primarily defined by their work or culture. Suicide remains most prevalent among middle-aged and elderly males - Canadian men in general being three times more likely to kill themselves than women - and among those who are single, divorced or whose partner has died. Coming to grips with a variety of intersecting causes is undoubtedly more challenging than analyzing the situations of groups with more obviously shared experiences, but there is no doubt of the public benefit that could derive from well-informed and ethically conducted work on this scale.
As explored in the Mindset field guide, the risk of suicide contagion is a real concern, and one to be taken into account in all reporting to the greatest extent compatible with good journalism. It should not trump all other concerns, raised in either the journalism or the suicide prevention communities. But work focused on people who share identifiable circumstances does requires more consideration of contagion issues than may be the case in some other forms of feature work in the suicide field.