Free speech sometimes needs to be saved from its practitioners. The quest for open discussion of suicide, particularly youth suicide, urgently needs to be rescued from an irresponsible contribution to the Auckland University student magazine this week. Maintaining its long tradition of editorial immaturity, Craccum has published an article which is little short of a suicide manual. It lists various methods, advising on the pain and reliability of each. Worse, if that can be imagined, the item is followed by an essay arguing that suicide is a decision to be respected and there is nothing that other people can, or should, do about it.
Ordinarily it is better to ignore this sort of moral deficiency. Outrage is oxygen to the irresponsible and any debate is bound to be invoked as justification of the decision to publish. But this newspaper has argued strenuously for more open reporting of suicide and Craccum's contribution, left uncontested, could only reinforce the concerns of those who constrain public information. They fear, more than anything else, that reports of suicide might glorify the act and thereby endanger others who are in a vulnerable state.
Suicide is never a decision to be respected. In those cultures where it has been given the guise of honour it is, in reality, as sad and sick as anywhere. It is a sickness. And the idea that the community should respect it as a normal, healthy decision, is equally as ill. A person who finds life so miserable needs and deserves help. The fact that so little is known about the demons that sometimes drive even ostensibly healthy, successful people to suicide, is no reason to give up the quest to find out. Researchers at Auckland University are doing just that, with a survey of survivors of suicide attempts. They deserve better than an article in the student magazine ridiculing counsellors and survivors as "fakers helping fakers."
That is particularly offensive when, by the article's own testimony, the body's natural and instinctive defences make most forms of suicide more difficult than most people suppose. Fictional representations have much to answer for in that respect. More is the pity that restrictions on factual reporting of particular cases contribute to that distorted impression. It is not in the interests of mass media to nauseate their audience with gratuitous details of a self-inflicted death, any more than with some of the more graphic evidence available in murder trials. But there is much that could be reported tastefully and usefully for better understanding of this terrible problem.
Nobody nowadays is deceived, or assisted, by the code "no suspicious circumstances" in reports of an inexplicable death. It no longer offers much solace or privacy to families of the deceased, nor does it keep the nature of the death from those who, the authorities fear, might be in danger of emulating it. It is time researchers took a hard look at the evidence for that fear. The principal cases of "copycat" suicide in the world have been caused by the deaths of movie and music stars such as Marilyn Monroe and Kurt Cobain, not the youth next door. Thus young people read of suicide only when it happens to the rich and famous, never the unglamorous tragedies of the majority.
And the sad fact remains that a country which has long suppressed public accounts of suicide has the highest proportion of its youth succumbing to despair. Responsible journalism can bring their circumstances to attention, widen discussion and make it more likely that solutions might be found.
<i>Editorial: </i>The last article that anybody needs
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