KEY POINTS:
Just about every personal misfortune is liable to be discussed in public media these days.
Cancer, teenage pregnancy, homosexuality, rape, incest, paedophilia, all subjects once considered unseemly for a general audience, are now reported frankly and fairly sensitively in a spirit of facing the facts of life.
And society is probably the better for it.
But there is one subject that remains officially unspeakable in this country. News media are not supposed to mention it by name and in specific cases they generally don't. The subject is suicide.
There is a law in New Zealand - and only in New Zealand, it seems - that insists when a death has been self-inflicted nothing about it can be publicised without a coroner's permission. Even when the inquest is held, long after the event, not much can be reported unless the coroner permits.
Rather than wait many months to report the truth, news services record a suicide as a sudden, unexplained death. The person has been found in a parked car or has fallen from a cliff. Code phrases are used: "police say no other person was involved", "no suspicious circumstances".
The Coroners Act precludes much more than a single paragraph in a column of news briefs and the nature of the death is never called by its name.
This has been the practice for as long as anyone can remember and, like most in the media, I have never been comfortable about it, particularly when we hear New Zealand has the highest youth suicide rate of comparable countries in the OECD.
So when notice came this week of a seminar on the research supporting these restrictions, I went along. It was run by an organisation with the unfortunate acronym Spinz (Suicide Prevention Information NZ) and funded by the Ministry of Health, which wants the media to be even more careful.
Researcher, Jane Pirkis of Melbourne University, gave us a sample of 100 studies in various countries since the 1960s that showed suicide rates increased for a few weeks after prominent news coverage of a particular case.
She was convinced the link was "causal" for news media, though surprisingly she was less certain of entertainment media. For all the graphic depictions of suicide in literature, film and drama, fiction seems not to have the influence of fact.
I don't doubt the findings. News of any self-destructive activity is liable to affirm the same inclinations among those susceptible to the suggestion. If suicide is to be suppressed it must be particularly contagious. I asked whether comparable studies had been made of the effects of reports of binge-drinking, boy racing or for that matter, murder. Seems not.
Nor was there research on the relative importance of news reports beside the many other influences and stresses recognised as suicide risks, though the experts know there is seldom a single cause and they urge that news reports should never imply one.
Ms Pirkis knew of no other country with a legal gag like the Coroners Act, and none of the 100 studies were carried out in this country, though one is about to be done here.
A team led by Auckland University's director of mental health research, Brian McKenna, is ready to trawl through 186 newspapers, 18 radio stations, nine television channels and 49 net sites to assess the quality of reporting.
Their criteria will be borrowed from a similar study in Australia, which counted "inappropriate words" such as "suicide" in a headline. And we should never use the term "committed suicide" for some reason.
More obviously, media should not glorify, glamorise or rationalise a person's fatal decision, and most obviously, should not publicise the method.
No decent newspaper would describe the method, for reasons of taste as much as safety. Nor could there ever be glamour or glory in the subject for the vast majority of readers. Publicity is being regulated for the sake of disturbed minds with quite different conceptions of life and death.
The ministry would prefer that media discuss suicide in generalities, emphasising warning signs, trends, advances in treatment and prevention services. But real life does not conform to generalities. It is the unique messy details of individual cases that touch people and leave them wiser to warning signs and sources of help.
If suicide researchers talked to real survivors rather than numbers, they might learn more than they have found from 100 statistical exercises, more about the nature and relative importance of all influences, not just news reports.
Nobody seems to know why this small, comfortable, intimate society has such a high rate of youth suicide. It could be that our unusual suppression of the subject is doing untold harm.
