Stepping Back from the Ledge, page 9
I wanted to tell her that this boy was still a juvenile, a kid really, that no other students were harmed, that maybe the parents in the class had the right to know who he was, but that no one else did. If we were lucky, I thought, the kid would live and this would be but a blip in a long and happy life. My mind drifted back a year earlier, to the moment I saw my mom’s name in a story online in my hometown newspaper that suggested her death was a suicide. It was a few days after she had died and the headline Woman Who Died at Canyon ID’d was placed under the tab labeled “Most Read” on azcentral.com.
When I worked at azcentral.com, the news site where stories from The Arizona Republic newspaper appeared, stories about deaths and suicide at the Grand Canyon were a curiosity. Even if you hadn’t visited the canyon, you knew so much about it and people read these stories, a lot of people. They clicked on the headline even if the story said little more than someone’s name, when they died, and an updated number of the people who had died at the canyon that year. I wondered if I had run any of these types of stories when I worked at the newspaper. Had I run anyone’s name? Had I written a brief like this on one of my weekend shifts when I made calls to the county sheriffs’ departments around the state to learn of any news? It made me feel sick to think that I might have, just as seeing my mom’s name in the newspaper had made me feel sick that day. The article about her said it was a possible suicide. It felt like this detail should be private, ours to hold on to for a while alone. It wasn’t that I felt ashamed, a feeling that surrounds some families with suicides, but it felt invasive. It felt like our story, our pain, not something to share. She hadn’t harmed anyone. Was the story any better by printing my mom’s name? Or was it enough to say that a woman died at the Grand Canyon, and say her age, without saying her death had been suspected a suicide?
In Cincinnati, I recused myself from the decision of naming the teenager who fired the gun in the classroom. I couldn’t think it through without thinking of my mom, of learning about her suicide, of having to tell others, of seeing it in print in the newspaper before I could even try to understand what had happened. I realized that I had been outranked by the editor of the newspaper, so maybe the decision was never mine to make. But I knew that my background might have made me sensitive, too sensitive, to make the decision, or maybe just the right amount of sensitive, actually, to make it.
I understand, the editor said.
Our newspaper published the teen boy’s name.
And maybe we did the right thing.
Maybe the public’s right to know outweighed his privacy, but that boy was seventeen. A month later, one of the TV news stations reported that the teen had moved from the hospital to a rehab facility. They didn’t name him, didn’t say much about his condition, other than that he had been moved. I’ve thought about this boy over the years, typically near the anniversary of my mom’s death, even now, almost eight years later. I wonder: Did he survive? Is he healthy? How much does he remember from that day? He would be twenty-five now, and seventeen would seem like a lifetime ago, and while the shooting definitely changed the course of his life, I don’t want it to define him. Is he glad he’s alive today—is he glad he was saved? I read somewhere that the majority of people who attempt suicide and live are relieved to be alive, grateful they didn’t die. I want to hug him, I want him to be OK. I want it to be his story to tell, if and when he’s ready.
I wonder if the choice we made in not writing much about the suicide was right. Maybe if we had written more about the shooting and the potential mental health issues that teenagers face, we could have helped lessen the stigma around suicide. But he was a kid and his parents didn’t want to talk, and had released a statement: “We thank all of you for your thoughts and prayers. We ask that the media please respect our privacy at this time so we can do what we need to do for our son and our family. We also ask that friends of our son and family please refrain from Facebook and Twitter comments. We appreciate the heroic efforts of UC Medical Center staff as they care for our son.”
Without his parents or the boy himself talking with a reporter, the story felt like an invasion. I felt an obligation to protect the boy and his family, in part because I couldn’t protect my mom or my family when she had died.
Many researchers and psychologists will say that destigmatizing suicide can lead to fewer deaths, that talking about it, writing about it, making the discussion of mental health issues a part of our conversation, will help. But another researcher has noted that there’s never been a time when suicide was less stigmatized, yet our suicide rates are higher than they’ve ever been. Another asks, but what would the rates be if we didn’t talk about it, how much higher might they be? I don’t know the answer. But now, I wanted to shield this boy and his family. The next story about the boy withheld his name.
There remains a delicate balance in writing and telling stories about suicide. How we share these stories can shape how the public feels, reacts, and deals with suicide, from funding suicide research to the language we use when talking about it. It can shape if and how we talk about suicide in our homes and schools. The media’s enormous responsibility has evolved over the years.
We know the media can play a key role in helping us and our society both talk about suicide and understand it. This means how suicide is portrayed in everything from TV shows and movies to how it’s reported in the news media. I wondered if we had always treaded so gently around the people who take their own lives.
There isn’t a lot of historical research analyzing coverage of suicide in the news. Gemma Richardson, a professor of journalism and media at Humber College in Toronto, Canada, is one of the few people who has researched at length how the news media has covered suicides.[1] In Ms. Richardson’s studies, she found that the details featured in stories about suicide in newspapers in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries would feel shocking to us today, even in a day of reality TV and nonstop sharing on social media. “Suicide deaths were treated as everyday occurrences and received small mentions along with other local, national and international information,” she wrote. She said we only need to look at one item on page two in The Toronto Globe on September 4, 1847, to understand how coverage differed: “A carpenter, named Nimbs, committed suicide in Niagara, on the 28th ultimo, by swallowing 55 grains of opium.” The news item was followed immediately by a blurb about the monthly meeting of the Toronto Building Society to be held the following Monday. Parts of the newspaper in those days often presented events in chronological order, could seem a mix of a police blotter and calendar. Suicides were reported in the same matter-of-fact style as other information was shared, no matter if the person who died was well known or not, whether they died in a public place or at home. It was reported as news.
By the mid-1850s, Ms. Richardson noted, the reporting of suicides changed from simple facts and details to something that carried more judgment. Suicide at that time often was described as a “rash act,” she wrote. Reporters often tried to find a reason for the death and when family or neighbors didn’t provide enough detail, the story often said a cause was yet to be determined, as if there was a specific event or action that caused the suicide, and it would soon be definitively discovered.
Coverage of suicide continued evolving, following the path of the news media coverage, and becoming more sensationalized. Later, mentions of suicide mostly disappeared from newspapers. If you only read the newspapers, you would think people died by car accidents and shootings, plane crashes and fires, but only a few famous people killed themselves.
The importance of this study, Ms. Richardson wrote, was that it showed that as public perceptions of suicide, and the laws surrounding it, gradually shifted from considering the act a crime to considering it an aspect of a psychiatric malady, reporting on suicide changed. Once suicide became an untouchable subject in newsrooms, the stigma became entrenched, making it hard to address in any meaningful way for decades.
By the early 1990s, psychologists and others began to look at the correlation between the media reporting on suicides and the contagion factor. Many journalists simply stopped writing about suicide. But researchers, who were seeing the numbers of suicides increase, wanted to learn if the media could help them report on suicide and perhaps help people in the process. In 1994, the Suicide Prevention Resource Center, a group that provides training to increase the knowledge and expertise of professionals serving people at risk of suicide, recommended reporting practices that might reduce the possibility of media-related suicide contagion.[2] They recommended that the media shouldn’t describe the technical method used in suicides, meaning that reporting that someone died from carbon monoxide poisoning was OK, but detailing the method was not. They didn’t want the media to glorify the person who died, or present it as a means to an end, such as ending depression or pain. The Centers for Disease Control recommended against placing any story about suicide in a prominent place such as the front page, and encouraged media outlets to include any information about suicide hotlines and where to get help.
The difficulty with the guidelines was that they conflicted with much of how journalists approached news. Journalists wanted more details, not fewer—they wanted to showcase a story if it was important and newsworthy. As a reporter and editor, I know that what actually happened was that many in the news media shied away from writing about suicide, preferring not to upset families or violate the new ethical guidelines. So it remained a mostly taboo topic and suicide wasn’t covered often.
Not writing about suicide meant that a critical health issue was missing from news coverage. It meant there was little to help encourage a national conversation about suicide and the role mental illness plays. So on the rare occasion when the media did cover suicide, it affected how people perceived it. It shaped how people think about suicide, how they understand it, and even the language we use to talk about it.
I thought back to the story written about my mom when she died at the canyon, the headline that read Woman Who Died at Canyon ID’d. It didn’t say “suicide,” though it did mention in the story that there was a report of a woman who was suicidal. It did mention the last area at the canyon where my mom was seen. When I read the story, I was upset that while the story didn’t explicitly say she killed herself, it pointed in that direction. It made me wonder how many people killed themselves that same day in the Phoenix area that we didn’t know about because they did so privately. At the time, I was upset that they ran my mom’s name. I had yet to really grasp the full understanding of her death, six days afterward, yet here was her death in the newspaper. Even though I was a journalist and had included the names of victims from shootings or other crimes, names of people whose families hadn’t approved, I was angry.
That same year my mom died, in 2012, talking about suicide and how to cover it became more common among the news media. Groups such as the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention and others became more active in urging the media to cover suicides sensitively.[3]
In many ways, some of the most important work that Dan Reidenberg has done around suicide has to do with how the media portrays it. Mr. Reidenberg, the executive director of Suicide Awareness Voices of Education, has spent more than two decades trying to help people, particularly the news media and more recently the entertainment industry, talk about suicide with sensitivity and understanding. His group works to prevent suicide through public awareness and education, reducing the stigma, and to serve as a resource to those who have lost someone to suicide.
I met Mr. Reidenberg a few years ago when he asked if I’d like to get involved with his organization and come to its annual remembrance event. He picked me up from the airport in Minneapolis and we talked about how difficult it is for journalists to write or share stories about suicide. They’re afraid of writing the wrong thing, I told him, afraid of causing more harm than good. Mr. Reidenberg nodded along, saying he understood. So much has been studied and written about the contagion effect when the media covers suicides that it’s no longer disputed.
“We know that how the media portrays suicide can greatly impact the lives of others,” he said. Mr. Reidenberg is often called to talk on national morning TV news programs when new studies are released about suicide rates and consulted for movie scripts or books. He understands the importance of his role as a suicide prevention advocate, as well as the role played by the media, and that although the roles differ, they can help each other.
Mr. Reidenberg’s organization has helped advocate for responsible reporting since 2011.[4] He is encouraged that he hears from reporters more often now. They sometimes call simply to discuss a story, to ask if their news organization should cover a particular suicide. “That’s really a positive thing,” he said. “Many media are trying to follow the recommendations, trying to make stories not as sensational, looking at the placement, the language they use, trying to present a more balanced perspective.”
The one consistent change he has seen over the years is that most news media now include a number or place where people can seek help, whether it’s a national hotline or local resources.
During the drive, I asked him about the idea that our society has now talked more about suicide, but the rates continue to climb. Does it make sense? Does talking about it reduce the stigma, or does it possibly serve as information for copycats? He explained that the simple act of talking about suicide doesn’t necessarily destigmatize it. “It’s how you talk about it,” he said. He understands how important and influential the media can be on society’s perception and understanding of suicide. He notes that while suicide is discussed more now than at any time in history, the numbers are high.
He cautions that the media cannot simply write about suicide when someone kills themselves. That’s the obvious, often sensational way to report. But there are other stories that show how suicide is a public health issue. The media can talk about public health issues in a factual and clear manner—about treatment and support systems, access to care, wait times for treatment centers—and thereby address the issue.
One new theory, he said, looks at the Papageno effect, a term used for stating that there are potentially protective effects of positive messaging, especially in relation to those who have survived suicidal ideation. It correlates positively in the way the Werther effect—the contagion theory—is negative.[5]
“We try to get out a message of hope and recovery,” he said of people who have survived a suicide attempt or recovered from deep depression. “If your report on it shows hope and recovery, you can actually reduce the risk of suicide. You don’t just have to do a story about someone who died by suicide, but someone who has survived an attempt, and lived a successful life. These are the kinds of stories that can not only change the conversation but reduce the risk others might feel from seeing that story.
“Remember this, Laura,” he said. “When journalists can talk about getting help, recovery, going on and living a productive life after treatment, even after an attempt, we can change the entire conversation about suicide and mental health. It can become a story about hope. Yours can be a story of hope.”
Chapter 6
Finding Hope
During these months, I looked for these moments of optimism and gratitude, and with it came a growing confidence in myself.
As I began to read more about suicide, I found another way to think and talk about it. I learned about the language around it, that when discussing how someone died, it’s important to use the right words, and that in fact saying “commit” is wrong. Psychologists and those who study suicide suggest that the acceptable way to say it is “died by suicide,” or “killed herself,” because the word commit conveys a feeling of crime or wrongdoing, which perhaps we don’t want to give.
I wish there was a phrase like there is in Spanish. I remember in my high school Spanish class, I learned a phrase, el vaso se rompio. There is no blame—“the vase broke itself.” I wondered if there was a way to say, she broke, my mom broke herself. And she did, mi mama se rompio. Or another phrase that my friend’s father used to use when a lightbulb burnt out: la luz se fue. It translates literally to “the light left,” which felt like what happened with my mom.
I knew I would then begin to change the way I talked about my mom. The shift in my language and description reflected a shift within myself. My mom did kill herself. She didn’t commit suicide. She was not a victim. I was not a survivor. She died by suicide, and I was starting to be OK with saying it, though not necessarily talking about it, two very different things. During the months before this shift in both how I talked about suicide or even thought about it, several things happened to help me find the gratitude in my own life.
John had had juvenile diabetes since he was a teenager. It had been thirty-five years of low and high blood sugar levels, and it began to put a strain on his arteries and heart, his kidneys and nerves. We decided that John should have a pancreas transplant to deal with his diabetes. He had always been good at controlling his blood sugar, so good that when I met him, we dated for months before I knew he was diabetic. We had managed his disease for years, him, mostly, but with me helping. Later he’d been able to use an insulin pump, a device the size of a pager. Instead of insulin injections through a syringe, he could tell the pump to deliver insulin. It helped him regulate his sugar much better, constantly delivering a drip, and then allowing him to push insulin to his body without shots.
