Editorial: Bringing suicide out from the shadows

OPINION: Suicide is no respecter of position. It blights the lives of the wealthy as well as the less well-off, and leaves behind unanswerable questions about whether partners, friends, mums and dads could have done or said something that might have prevented a loved one taking such a desperate step.

New Zealand might be seen as a great place to live, but also has one of the OECD's highest suicide rates. Health Ministry figures show that about 500 people a year killed themselves between 2000 and 2006; that many more were unsuccessful in the attempt; and that more Maori than non-Maori succeeded.

Against that, and for fear of encouraging copycats, the country also has one of the world's most secretive regimes for reporting suicide in the news media. If that were working, the statistics should not be so high.

In 2008, the Clark-led government launched a five-year "action plan" on suicide prevention, which included research into the way media outlets report the subject. The project sponsor was then associate health minister Jim Anderton, a man whose daughter committed suicide in 1994. He has never been a fan of the media reporting self-inflicted death, having bought into a theory advanced by some experts that for it to discuss the subject openly might prompt other vulnerable people to choose to end their own lives. In fact, international research on the subject is mixed and, until recently, none had been done here.

The study the last government agreed to undertake examined the extent and nature of reporting of suicide by the New Zealand news media, and analysed that against "best practice" guidelines drawn up by the ministry as well as against the Coroners Act 2006, which is highly restrictive. Research results became available last week.

Te Pou, the part of the ministry that undertook the research, found the New Zealand media reports on suicide quite often – although the period it studied included the lengthy Bain trial, with allegations about Robin Bain, and the Tony Veitch affair – and that, with some caveats, "most items portrayed suicide in an appropriate manner". It identified room for improvement – few would quibble with that – and encouraged better interaction between mental health professionals and journalists.

The outcome is cheering for those who believe that, if done responsibly, reporting on suicide, including, sometimes, individual cases, on the reasons leading up to it, and on the devastation it causes, might help families and friends of the depressed seek professional assistance. Journalists want to report the why, rather than the how.

The research will, perhaps, lead to editors and the ministry reviewing current guidelines, as well as industry-formulated protocols on suicide reporting. It would be better, however, were it to prompt the health minister to review the Coroners Act, which leaves decisions on what can be reported publicly after inquests into self-inflicted deaths in the hands of cautious coroners. Suicide is a scourge, takes too many of our young people, and should not be allowed to happen in the shadows – because the suicide toll is regularly higher than the road toll every year.

- © Fairfax NZ News