Suicide: Psychologist  charges media on  safe reporting

By Saheed Ibrahim
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In a bid to finding a lasting solution to the rising cases of suicidal behaviours among Nigerian youths, a psychologist and addiction therapist, Mrs Chinelo Olayimika has charged journalists to adopt safe reporting when covering suicide cases, adding that giving out the suicide method may lead to increase in the act.

Mrs Olayimika gave this charge while speaking with The Hope during the week.

She stated that suicide is a very sensitive issue and the way it is being reported will go a long way to reducing or increasing the problem among the people, especially the younger people.

She urged Nigerian journalists to emulate their counterparts in the developed nations, who are always conscious of how suicide cases are reported.

Hear her: “In the developed world, the way suicide behaviour or anyone who dies by suicide is being reported; the words they use, their style of reporting, their method of reporting; in fact, they are conscious enough not to mention the means by which the victims committed the act.

According to her, when the details of a suicide act is given to the public, it may lead to copycat behaviour among those who are already facing difficulties in life and looking for easy way out.

 “One of the factors is because people get to see it on the news. Imagine you wake up in the morning and in the news you hear that someone died of suicide and the means by which the person died of it is through sniper. The next thing on the mind of a young person, who is probably having a hard time and wants to end his or her life, will be ‘Oh,I heard someone successfully committed suicide with sniper and boom, let me go get it’.

“So, the psychological explanation for this is that there are cognitive factors to which people commit suicide: some people have faulty behaviour and faulty interpretation of life events and are not able to build enough resilience to stress of life. So, what they want to do is to find easy way out and that is suicide”, she averred.

Mrs Olayimika, who is also a general mental health practitioner, further warned that suicide rope or any image that suggests suicide should not be shown on the conventional media and also on the social media platforms as they may induce the audience, especially those with faulty behaviour and faulty interpretation of life events, to engage in suicidal acts.

“There are better ways of sending out information without giving out too much to people because with my years of experience working with people with depressive disorder and not to forget that mental illness seems to be on top of the reasons why people commit suicide; these people are very sensitive to negative comments and critical comments or anything that may be suggestive

“Even showing rope or suggestive materials is also not helpful if we are going to combat this copycat behaviour” she said.

She however advised that people should show love and care to one another and be careful of the things they put on the social media because suicidal behaviours can be prompted by cyber-bullying, body shaming and other negative comments and these may also affect “people that are closer to us”.