A friend invited to a conspirative meeting with strangers (where I bumped into 60pages-fellow Simon), so I joined in for a pinot noir. And how refreshing it felt: straight-talking to people, unknown to me to that minute, cutting the crap. We plowed through the topics – the definition of our generation, similarities between media and Swiss banking, submissive sex – until someone articulated a feeling I’ve had for a long time: We should talk more about mental illness, and in consequence, about suicide.
There is an agreement among journalists that you should not cover suicide under any circumstance for what science calls «Werther Effect». If you report on suicide, «Werther Effect» put in a nutshell, you will encourage certain people to kill themselves. Do you want this responsibility as a reporter? No.
Doesn’t this feel strange to you as well? How can you help by not-talking about it? Let me, for a moment, turn the argument:
What if not reporting on suicide can make people kill themselves, too?
If the task of journalists is to shed light on important subjects, to report on societal defects, to fuel a conversation – they are obliged to report on the phenomenon of suicide. No need to glorify it or giving exact How-To’s, but to establish a open conversation. About living with mental illnesses, the fragile state of the human mind, about overcoming depression, seeking help and getting on. If we remain silent, we stigmatize the many lonely souls in the dark. It might not be the reporting that kills people, but the silence before it.