Covering suicides

I covered more than I'd like to remember. The newsrooms I worked in always followed the basic rule already discussed here: Public figure or public place merits coverage, everything else generally doesn't.

I always approached the story with a lot of empathy for the family of the deceased. That probably comes from having experienced grieving for suicide victims within my own family.

In my experience they aren't that much different from relatives of other people grieving sudden death of a relative. Some will want to talk about it in the moment, most will not. Of those who don't want to talk about it, some will still tolerate a few questions and many will not.

After one particularly gruesome suicide I wrote about -- former CIA agent setting himself on fire in the heart of downtown -- the University of Pennsylvania's Annenberg Public Policy Center sent me a packet they had put together on best practices for covering suicide. At first I was a little put off by it because I felt like I had dealt with that story about as well as I could without sensationalizing it and I wasn't sure why they sent me the packet. But when I went back and read through it later, it had some good tips for writing about suicide in a way that is less likely to lead to copycats. I can't find it online, but they have some good information up here:

http://www.annenbergpublicpolicycenter.org/ProjectDetails.aspx?myId=28

Also, the basic principles for covering any type of trauma apply to covering suicides. Years ago I attended a training session put on by the folks at Michigan State's trauma reporting program -- now called the "Victims and the Media Program." I always found their advice useful and they've got some resources up here:

http://victims.jrn.msu.edu/index.html

 

A public safety conference I was recently at had a session on rail crossings and part of that included a train engineer talking about the impact that people who chose to commit suicide this way has on the train drivers. I was blown away, and it's something I'd never even considered. They've got an up close view of this person's death in a terribly gruesome way, they're driving the mechanism that's causing the death and there's absolutely nothing they can do about it. The psychological effect on the driver is pretty profound.

I left that session thinking that if I was still a crime/public safety reporter at a newspaper, that would be my next big project: trying to talk to train engineers about these suicides. Seems like that would take the romanticism out of the idea pretty quick to make people realize that this form of suicide -- above all others -- has a tremendous effect on a complete stranger that the person taking his or her own life likely never thought about.