When famous comedian Ni Min-jan (倪敏然) ended his life in April this year, the soap opera began. News crews raced to the Ilan County mountainside where his body was found to film the tree from which he had hung himself. They dug up photos of him leaving the Toucheng (頭城) train station -- the last time he was captured on film. They tailed his wife and children, hounding them with questions.
They tailed the Chinese actress Xia Yi (夏禕), with whom he was reported to have had an affair. Anyone with any connection to Ni was considered fair game. His suicide stayed in the news until a different suicide -- of a couple who met over the Internet and made a pact to end their lives -- took its place.
Taiwan's high suicide rate is one of its most pressing social issues. It's also one of its most highly publicized. But some say the nature of local media coverage may actually exacerbate the problem rather than helping alleviate it.
"The bigger problem is that suicide as a social phenomenon deserves media attention because it's a huge public health issue," said Wang Shih-fan (
The balancing act, Wang said, is how the media can cover suicide without sensationalizing it? There seems to be "very little coverage on suicide as a public health issue."
Suicide has been one of the top-10 causes of death in Taiwan for the past nine years. Over the past 10 years, the nation's suicide rate has increased from seven out of every 10,000 persons to 15.3 out of every 10,000 persons. While once the largest age bracket was those between 45 and 64, it's now those between 25 and 44. For people between ages 15 and 24, suicide is the second leading cause of death.
Last year, a reported 3,468 people took their own life, or one every two-and-a-half hours. Authorities point out, however, that suicide rates are thought to be underestimated by 20 percent to 25 percent among the elderly and 6 percent to 12 percent among other age groups, with many likely suicides wrongly reported as accidents or where the cause of death was listed as "unknown."
Medical professionals worry that suicide is becoming more ritualized, a phenomenon they attribute to the sensationalized coverage of suicide in the media. In 1998, when a woman in Hong Kong killed herself by sealing her apartment with tape and burning charcoal until she died of asphyxiation, it became one of the top-three methods used by those attempting to kill themselves.
Several Internet sites dedicated to suicide methods have sprung up. Many even have bulletin boards where those
wanting to end their lives can find like-minded people. More
upsettingly, so-called family suicides have become
increasingly common. Either to take revenge against a spouse, or out of the belief that it would be cruel to orphan their children, some suicidal parents first murder their children before taking their own life. There have been 78 such cases in Taiwan in the past decade, according to a recent study conducted by researchers at National Taiwan University. Half of those cases have occurred in the past three years alone.
Wang was among several academics and civil groups who, in August, proposed a set of guidelines for news coverage of suicide which they hoped local media outlets would follow. The guidelines they proposed follow closely the guidelines promoted by the World Health Organization on responsible coverage of suicides in the news (see factbox).
Calls to several medial outlets inquiring about their guidelines for covering suicides went unanswered. But one person, a cameraman for a satellite news gathering unit who asked to remain anonymous, said that guidelines, if they exist, aren't put into practice. Instead, he and other cameramen are
pressured to get the most "interesting" images.
"It's deemed `newsworthy' if there was something about [the suicide] that was unusual," the cameraman said. "If it was an old man who took sleeping pills we don't go. If it was an Internet suicide or a family suicide or especially a celebrity, we're told to go. We're not told what specific images to get, but there's a tacit understanding that we should try to get images that other stations won't have."
But academics and media watch groups say even aspects of suicide coverage that might not be considered bad taste have been shown to adversely affect suicide rates in the immediate aftermath of the coverage.
Research shows that heavy reporting of a celebrity suicide can increase suicide rates by as much as 14 percent. After celebrity Leslie Cheung (
Conversely, a study in Vienna showed that, after media there launched a self-restraint campaign and stopped showing graphic and sensational descriptions of suicide, after six months the city's suicide rate dropped by 8 percent.
"What's upsetting is that suicide is a largely preventable problem," said Lyu Shu-yu (
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