Covering suicides

[KYSportsWriter]

What is interesting is that the football coach I talked to really wanted to do a story on his wife's suicide, and kept it in mind over the course of a couple years that we were in touch. But he decided not to because he didn't want his young son to find out about it from Google some day instead of from him.

He wouldn't go on record - maybe he might have eventually - but he told me every single detail about her death, her depression, etc., etc. He was really torn between protecting his son from an inadvertent find and becoming a spokesman - even for a day - for suicide prevention.

But your original post said you called him "over and over and over." That's a bit much, imo.

 

[Dick Whitman]

What is interesting is that the football coach I talked to really wanted to do a story on his wife's suicide, and kept it in mind over the course of a couple years that we were in touch. But he decided not to because he didn't want his young son to find out about it from Google some day instead of from him.

He wouldn't go on record - maybe he might have eventually - but he told me every single detail about her death, her depression, etc., etc. He was really torn between protecting his son from an inadvertent find and becoming a spokesman - even for a day - for suicide prevention.

But your original post said you called him "over and over and over." That's a bit much, imo.

Yeah, I think maybe it felt like "over and over and over" is what I was getting at, because it was such an icky part of the job. When it led to a discussion, I racked my brain for real details and I think that it was three phone calls. I think at the end of the night, I got the, "This voice mail box is full" message.

This was before texting. Thank God.

 

[Gold]

If a coroner or police officer is quoted - in the Seau case, the officer said it was being investigated as a suicide -it should be reported.

When someone young dies, it calls for an explanation.

Suicide is a major cause of death of people between 15 and 24. I understand how hard it is, but to not report on suicides may be hiding a problem that people need to know about. Reporting a suicide, rather than inspiring copycats, may help prevent suicides if experts are brought into the situation.

 

[outofplace]

One I ran into early on in my career was a person we normally wouldn't have written about, but he shot himself in public. This was actually about a week before my first day working for the paper, but I dealt with some of the fallout.

The guy and his wife were separated. They had two sons, one living with each of them. He finds her dancing with another man in a club, then goes to get a gun from his car and shoots himself right there in the parking lot.

My first day, there is a memo in everybody's mailbox reminding us to be careful who we let in the building because there has been a recent threat on the life of one of our reporters.

A few months later, I call one of our local baseball coaches for a preview. He tells me he isn't interested and hangs up. Turns out he is the brother of the guy who committed suicide and he is the one who came to our office and threatened to kill the reporter who covered it. So nice of my boss to warn me. :

Actually ended up getting to know both of the sons, who were damn good football players. The older one was a good kid. The younger one was nuts. Got a Division II scholarship, but he quit and dropped out of the school about a week into preseason practice. Not sure what happened to him.

 

[User 4332]

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

 

[User 4332]

Profound statement here, but ... circumstances are everything. We have had a number of suicides here at one train crossing in Palo Alto, to the point that several of them were considered copycat/teens romanticizing the idea. That became a public safety issue in addition to a matter of public curiosity, and IIRC a few of the parents were pretty happy to talk. But without a component of either public safety, a public figure or the event happening in a public place so everybody already knew about it, I wouldn't. Certainly not that day.

In reference to the other thread with the 12-year-old, I believe I would have quit on the spot before making that phone call.

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.