Abstract
Background:
Sensible media reporting has been considered an important suicide prevention strategy which is an under-researched issue in Nigeria. There is a dearth of research assessing how the media has been reporting suicidal news to the general population in Nigeria.
Aim:
It was aimed to see the adherence of news reports to the World Health Organization (WHO) suicide reporting guidelines while reporting the events.
Methods:
We searched the published contents of 10 English newspapers of Nigeria and assessed the adherence to the WHO media guidelines for reporting suicide from January 2010 to December 2019.
Results:
Most of the reports (85.31%) mentioned completed suicides, 4.4% recorded suicides, and 9.5% recorded suicide-related homicides. The majority of the reports mentioned the name (85.6%) and profession (63.8%) of the person; the name of the method (92%) and life events (67.8%). The word ‘suicide’ was mentioned in the headline of 87.6% of the reports; the method was mentioned in the headline of 22.8% of the reports, and 31.7% of the reports referred to life events in the headline. Only 8.8% of reports had traced mental illness, 33.3% traced the warning signs, 2.8% mentioned evidence of substance abuse and very few reports mentioned educative materials.
Conclusion:
The study found that Nigeria’s online newspapers are poorly adherent to the WHO media reporting guidelines. Explicit descriptions of the person, methods, life events, and mono-causal explanations were frequently published. Negligible initiatives have been found to educate the general people in the reports.
Introduction
Across the globe, suicide is a major public health problem and has a wide range of continuous economical, psychological, and social risk consequences (World Health Organization [WHO], 2019). According to the WHO, every 40 seconds a life is lost to suicide, every year close to 800,000 people died by suicide (WHO, 2014). Although suicide is a global phenomenon across continents, however, low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) account for about 80% of the global mortality (WHO, 2019).
Media has been identified as one of the key areas of the society in the coordination of suicide prevention efforts (Niederkrotenthaler et al., 2020; World Health Organization, 2017b; Zalsman et al., 2016). Evidence has shown the dual protective and harmful features of media reporting of suicides. The protective effect also termed ‘Papageno’ is used to describe exposure to suicide news that has shown to decrease suicide behaviour rates (Niederkrotenthaler et al., 2010). Phillips (1974) termed ‘Werther Effect’ as the expression for the effect of unethical sensational reporting of suicide on the increment of suicide rate. Nowadays advance in information and technology has changed the traditional media practices. Internet and online media are currently the main wellspring of data about suicides (Westerlund et al., 2012) and playing a big role in facilitating exposure to suicide contents among vulnerable populations.
The WHO and International Association for Suicide Prevention (IASP) formulated and disseminated guidelines for media professionals (working in print, broadcast, and online media) to minimise insensible coverage and to inform and inspire media personnel across the globe. The guideline encouraged adaption to cultural context of suicide to ensure wide dissemination of suicide prevention messages (WHO, 2017b).
In African region which includes Nigeria, there is gross under-reporting of data on suicide due to stigma, cultural believes and lack of vital registration system (WHO, 2014). This situation especially in Nigeria is worrisome. Nigeria’s age-standardised suicide death rate was 17.3 suicides per 100,000 people (WHO, 2019) and has Africa’s highest number of depression cases (WHO, 2017a). Considering the relatively high youthful population which makes up the productive demography of the country (Worldbank, 2020), continuous increase in suicide rate will have economic consequences on the country. However, despite the high rate of suicide in Nigeria, there is lack of research to show the direction of media reporting. This study was aimed at assessing the quality of news reporting on suicidal behaviour in Nigeria against the guideline of WHO.
Methods
Data collection
This study was a retrospective review of online news portal in Nigeria between January 2010 and December 2019. Out of a proposed list of 50 indigenous online news platform in Nigeria, 10 were selected for this research. Credibility of the selected platform was screened by two independent journalists and by the research team. Followership, awards and years of online presence were criteria considered in the selection of the news portal. The portals selected have over 10 years’ online media presence and at least 1 million active followers on their social media platforms. Additionally, due to the absence of indigenous vernacular online news platform in Nigeria having local language translation menu was also part of the consideration for selection of the news platform. List of online news portals include The Daily Post, The Daily Trust, The Guardian, The Vanguard, The Punch, The Nigeria Tribune, The Premium Times (English), The Nation (English), The Channels news, and The New Naija (LegitNg).
The news platforms were thoroughly reviewed and analysed for suicide and suicide attempt news. Search terms for suicide or suicide-related event used include suicide, self-harm, hanging, jumping in front of train/car, fall from height, gun fire, and drowning. Month, year of occurrence and characteristics of the suicide case were extracted from the reports. Data coding was done following the WHO media guideline (WHO, 2017b) and the structure previous similar study conducted by Arafat et al. (2019).
Inclusion criteria
The inclusion criteria for this analysis include news of those specifically defined as suicide and suicide attempts, suicidal news from Nigerian residents, and suicidal news linked to Nigeria’s geographical region.
Exclusion criteria
Suicidal bombing or terrorist attacks, commentary, or editorial, unrelated suicide news, and controversial or vague suicide news were excluded from the study.
Statistical analysis
We used Microsoft Excel 2019 version for data coding and entry Statistical Program for the Social Science (SPSS) version 22 for the analysis.
Results
Pattern of suicidal behaviours in reports (n = 571)
The study reviewed 10 online news portals where 571 reports were collected (Table 1). The majority of the reports (85.31%) described the completed suicides and majority of the reports (78.1%) described a single individual. The suicide pact was reported in 4.4% reports and suicide associated homicide was found in 9.5% of reports (Table 2).
Distribution of news in 10 English newspapers (n = 571).
Distribution of pattern of suicidal behaviours in reports (n = 571).
Potentially harmful characteristics
The majority of the reports mentioned the name (85.6%) and occupation (63.8%) of the person. The name of the method was mentioned in 92% of the reports, life events were mentioned in 67.8% of the reports (Table 3). Among the reports, 53.2% explained suicide on the basis of the mono-causality, 13.8% mentioned suicide notes, and 9% had citations from those notes (Table 3). Analysis of headlines revealed that the term ‘suicide’ was mentioned in the headline of 87.6% reports, the method was mentioned in the headline of 22.8% reports, and 31.7% reports mentioned life events in the headline (Table 3). More than half 63% of the reports provided any sort of photo and about 10% (58) posted the photo of the person.
Adherence of news reports to WHO guidelines (n = 571).
Potentially helpful characteristics
Only 8.8% of reports had traced mental illness, 33.3% traced the warning signs and 16 (2.8%) mentioned evidence of substance abuse (Table 3). Few reports had expert opinion (0.7%), research findings (1.8%), statistics, prevention program 11 (2.3%), educative information 12(2.1%) and only 0.4% reported contact identities for help (Table 3).
Discussion
Over the years, researches have linked suicide contagion with inappropriate media reporting. Sinyor et al. (2018) found increased suicide to be associated with suicide methods, headlines, suicide methods, suicide, and suicide cluster. Other shred of evidence include copycat or imitation of suicides (Abrutyn & Mueller, 2014; Chen et al., 2012; Niederkrotenthaler et al., 2009; Stack, 2005; Yip et al., 2006), sensationalised and romanticised suicide report (Sudak & Sudak, 2005). Responsive media coverage has therefore been proposed as an effective tool for suicide prevention at community level (WHO, 2017b; Zalsman et al., 2016). However, it was not studied previously in Nigeria. Therefore, we aimed to assess the quality of online newspapers reporting suicidal activities in Nigeria against the WHO recommendations for suicide reporting.
The study reviewed 10 online newspapers where 571 reports were assessed and found that news reports of suicide in Nigeria are poorly adherently to the WHO guidelines (Table 3). The majority of the reports mentioned the name, occupation the person, name of the method, life events, simplistic mono-causal explanation of suicide. Headlines were insensibly made and mentioned the term suicide, name of the method and the life events. The reports rarely reported educating materials to prevent suicide (Table 3).
A similar pattern of news presentation reported in the African countries like Ghana where most of the news reports failed to comply with the WHO guidelines (Quarshie et al., 2020). Nonetheless, a slightly different situation has been reported in Egypt where media complied with few of the guidelines, such as not defining suicide as ‘success’ or ‘failure, not using images or videos, not mentioning the suicide note of a victim and not adding a quote about the victim (Mesbah, 2014). A recent review from WHO-South-East Asia also reported nearly similar finding of media reporting in LMICs of the region (Arafat, Kar, et al., 2020). Other studies also reported the poor adherence in Bangladesh (Arafat et al., 2019; Arafat, Mali, et al., 2020), China (Chu et al., 2018), India (Arafat, Menon, et al., 2020; Menon et al., 2020), and Indonesia (Nisa et al., 2020).
Changing this poor adherence to media guidelines in Nigeria could be a challenging task. Suicide is stigmatised in the culture, criminal offence in the legal status and inadequate mental health services are the fundamental challenges. Reduction of stigma demands long term activities and decriminalisation demands the political will. Regular collaboration between the media and mental health personnel could be an immediate necessity. Proper strategies are recommended to make aware the media personnel and sustain their motivation.
There are several limitations of this study for which careful interpretation is needed to generalise the results. The major limitations are: news stories were checked purposefully, and the analysis included only 10 online newspapers.
Although only ten online newspapers have been scrutinised, to the best authors’ knowledge, this is the first such study in Nigeria that could serve as the primary empirical finding. However, further research may be needed, despite including other stakeholders. Immediate steps are warranted to make aware the media personnel the importance and association of media reports and suicidality.
Conclusion
The study showed that Nigeria’s newspaper reports of suicide in the online newspapers adhere poorly to WHO’s recommendations for media coverage. There was regular documentation of specific descriptions of the person, methods of suicide, life events, and monocausal explanations. Negligible initiatives have been found to educate the general people in the reports. Further research and collaboration are warranted to investigate the impact of the status quo and to bolster the enduring positive contribution of media to prevent suicide.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
We want to sincerely thank Dr Sujit Kumar Kar for his support throughout the process of this study.
Conflict of interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Ethical approval
As all reports have been publicly released before, no formal ethical approval has been obtained.
