Editorial: Shine light into a dark corner

Neil Maclean. Photo / APN

It is cheering to hear the Chief Coroner, Judge Neil MacLean, suggest that restrictions should be eased on the reporting of suicides, thus contradicting the established position of the Ministry of Health and of some - though by no means all - people working in the area of suicide prevention.

Judge MacLean's remarks were made against a statistical background that is cause for deep concern. Our overall rate of suicide has dropped since the mid-1990s, but it is the fifth highest for males and the eighth highest for females among developed countries - higher than those of Australia, the US, Canada and the UK.

Worse, we have the dubious distinction of the second-highest rates of suicide among young people, trailing only Finland for males and Japan for females. We remain one of a very small number of countries that have higher suicide death rates at younger ages than at older ages.

These sorry statistics have been compiled in an era when the restrictions on reporting about suicide in this country are among the world's most stringent.

The media may not say that a death was self-inflicted before an inquest has taken place - hence the common circumlocution that "police say there are no suspicious circumstances".

And even after the coroner has returned a finding that a death was suicide, the media are banned from reporting that fact unless a coroner gives consent.

That consent is given only if the coroner believes that releasing further details is "unlikely to be detrimental to public safety" and in practice it is seldom given.

In such an environment, Judge MacLean's comments this week - "probably you can gently open things up a bit ... to start the debate going" - semaphore a significant shift.

In barely a fortnight he will attend a meeting of the Media Freedom Committee of the local branch of the Commonwealth Press Union which will discuss this very subject.

The judge plainly has more sympathy for the news media's views on the matter than the Justice and Law Reform Select Committee did when, considering the 2006 amendments to the 1988 Coroners Act, it spurned the idea of freeing up reporting.

And his words count: he need only instruct his colleagues to be more open in their application of the public safety argument to create a massive shift in the discourse about suicide.

At the heart of the public safety argument, of course, is the suggestion that reporting might encourage copycat behaviour. The Ministry of Health warns against "frequent or repetitive" reporting, particularly of methods, and "[encouraging] the public perception that suicide is a reasonable, understandable and common approach to solving life difficulties".

In that matter, the ministry and the media are of one mind. The CPU submission in 2005 included draft protocols that addressed both those concerns and many more besides. Media are very sensitive to the dangers of simplistic explanations; of romanticising suicides, particularly of celebrities; and of adding to the grief of families already traumatised.

We do not seek to engage in invasive and sensationalist coverage of the acts of suicide and their immediate aftermath, not least becase the public would rightly recoil from such an approach and we are not in the business of losing readers.

But many of those bereaved by suicide - in particular parents - are enthusiastic proponents of greater openness. They don't want their loved ones' last seconds anatomised in grisly detail. But they want the circumstances, the thinking, the words spoken and unspoken to be subjected to the most searching inquiry.

That's not easy to do when the very fact that the suicide occurred remains hidden from public view. It's plain that the secrecy is not working for us. It is surely well past time to shine a little light into this dark corner of our national life.