Hacker News Reader

Comment by eddiegroves | Hacker News Reader

I'm not sure about how it is in USA but a lot of countries have strict rules around the media reporting suicides, so it is deliberate that the topic is under reported.

Naturally a lot of people disagree with this and there's constantly heated debate on the future of the media's role.

View on HN

They do tend to cluster, and more so when they're in the public eye.

Yeah, they are completely avoided in Australia, only time you really hear about one in the media is if it was a public figure. I don't really think this is the right thing to do, it masks that there is any problem so it doesn't get the attention it needs.

It's against broadcasting rules to publish anything relating to suicide. Especially euthanasia.

I gather that exceptions are made for exceptional news.

The usual codewords are "Police say there were no suspicious circumstances".

The more you talk about suicide, the more people commit it. It's a terrible conundrum in spreading awareness of how many people actually commit suicide. If there is a high-profile case of suicide reported, there will usually be an uptick in suicide and single car, single-passenger car crashes by people in similar demographics. There is an entire section in Cialdini's book Influence, on the social proof of suicide, and I just recently heard this Freakonomics podcast on the subject http://www.freakonomics.com/2011/08/31/new-freakonomics-radi...

Background to the debate (and the origin of the strict rules in the first place): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copycat_suicide

I worked for a newspaper in Texas, and the editors told us not to cover suicides.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com