Reporting suicide: Interpreting media guidelines

Numerous international studies have shown that media reporting of suicide can encourage copycat acts. Australia, like other countries, has developed guidelines (referred to as Reporting Suicide and Mental Illness) to encourage responsible reporting of suicide and to avoid imitative behaviour. These guidelines have been well-received by media professionals. Some, however, have indicated that the guidelines are not always easy to interpret. This study explored the interpretability of the Australian guidelines. Three trained independent reviewers coded 197 newspaper articles (relating to 28 suicides) for quality against nine criteria from the Australian guidelines. The level of inter-rater agreement was 'good' or 'very good' for all of the questions except one. Excluding this question, the overall percentage agreement was 78.93 per cent. Agreement was poorest when the questions required subjective judgements. In particular, independent reviewers had difficulty agreeing on whether individual articles provided simplistic or more contextualised views of suicide. The study suggests that the guidelines' meaning is generally understood. Interpreting the more nuanced recommendations is not always straightforward. Future revisions to Reporting Suicide and Mental Illness may need to consider opportunities to clarify them and to test this with journalists.