Document Type : Research paper
Authors
- Sujita Kumar Kar 1
- Natarajan Varadharajan 2
- S.M. Yasir Arafat 3
- Vikas Menon 4
- Jigyansa Ipsita Pattnaik 5
- Rosali Bhoi 6
- Anu Mary Mani 7
- Neetu Kurian 8
- Sreeja Sahadevan 9
- Sreeja Sreekumar 10
- Sandesh Venu 11
- Susanta Kumar Padhy 12
1 King George's Medical University, Lucknow, India
2 Jawaharlal Institute of Postgraduate Medical Education and Research (JIPMER), Puducherry
3 Department of Psychiatry, Bangladesh Specialized Hospital Limited, Dhaka-1207, Bangladesh.
4 Jawaharlal Institute of Postgraduate Medical Education and Research (JIPMER)
5 Assistant Professor, Department of Psychiatry, Kalinga Institute of Medical Sciences, Bhubaneswar, Odisha, India
6 Senior Consultant Psychiatrist, Department of Psychiatry, Tata Motors Hospital, Telco Colony, Jamshedpur, Jharkhand-831004.
7 Associate Professor, Department of Psychiatry, Al Azhar Medical College, Thodupuzha, Kerala
8 Assistant Professor, Department of Psychiatry, MOSC Medical College, Kolenchery, Kerala.
9 Specialty Registrar, Psychiatry of Learning Disabilities, Hertfordshire Partnership University NHS Foundation Trust, Little Plumstead Hospital, Norwich, England, United Kingdom NR13 5EW
10 Assistant Professor, Department of Psychiatry, MOSC Medical College, Kolenchery, Kerala
11 Assistant Professor, Department of Psychiatry, Pondicherry Institute of Medical Sciences, Puducherry-605014, India
12 Professor, Department of Psychiatry, All India Institute of Medical Sciences, Bhubaneswar 751019, India.
Abstract
Background: International and national guidelines mention outlines of reporting suicide notes in news reports. However, very little do we know about the status of media reporting of suicide notes from India. We aimed to assess the contents of the media reports on suicide, focusing on the descriptions of suicide notes.
Methods: We analyzed the media reports on suicide published in Odia, Malayalam and English published from Odisha and Kerala between 2019 and 2020 and assessed the quality against the World Health Organization media reporting guidelines.
Result: We assessed 625 news reports, of which about 11% (n=67) had mentioned a suicide note; most were in English language reports (n=41), followed by Malayalam (n=20) and Odia (n=6). More than 60% of the reports mentioned a summary of the suicide note, more than 40% had reference to a person, and 44% had attributed reasons like shame, blame, guilt or other. The important positive characteristic noted was that no report mentioned any photo of suicide notes. The study revealed the quality of media reporting of suicide with a specific focus on suicide notes in India.
Conclusion: It presents a similar quality of media reporting to other domains that predominate a high presence of negative characteristics and a negligible presence of positive reporting characteristics.
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