News reporting of suicidal behaviour in Nigeria : Adherence assessment to World Health Organization guidelines

BACKGROUND: Sensible media reporting has been considered an important suicide prevention strategy which is an under-researched issue in Nigeria. There is a dearth of research assessing how the media has been reporting suicidal news to the general population in Nigeria.

AIM: It was aimed to see the adherence of news reports to the World Health Organization (WHO) suicide reporting guidelines while reporting the events.

METHODS: We searched the published contents of 10 English newspapers of Nigeria and assessed the adherence to the WHO media guidelines for reporting suicide from January 2010 to December 2019.

RESULTS: Most of the reports (85.31%) mentioned completed suicides, 4.4% recorded suicides, and 9.5% recorded suicide-related homicides. The majority of the reports mentioned the name (85.6%) and profession (63.8%) of the person; the name of the method (92%) and life events (67.8%). The word 'suicide' was mentioned in the headline of 87.6% of the reports; the method was mentioned in the headline of 22.8% of the reports, and 31.7% of the reports referred to life events in the headline. Only 8.8% of reports had traced mental illness, 33.3% traced the warning signs, 2.8% mentioned evidence of substance abuse and very few reports mentioned educative materials.

CONCLUSION: The study found that Nigeria's online newspapers are poorly adherent to the WHO media reporting guidelines. Explicit descriptions of the person, methods, life events, and mono-causal explanations were frequently published. Negligible initiatives have been found to educate the general people in the reports.

Medienart:

E-Artikel

Erscheinungsjahr:

2021

Erschienen:

2021

Enthalten in:

Zur Gesamtaufnahme - volume:67

Enthalten in:

The International journal of social psychiatry - 67(2021), 5 vom: 20. Aug., Seite 448-452

Sprache:

Englisch

Beteiligte Personen:

Oyetunji, Tosin Philip [VerfasserIn]
Arafat, Sm Yasir [VerfasserIn]
Oluwaseyi, Famori Stephen [VerfasserIn]
Oluwasanmi, Obafemi [VerfasserIn]
Afolami, Michael [VerfasserIn]
Ajayi, Faith Moyo [VerfasserIn]

Links:

Volltext

Themen:

Content analysis
Journal Article
News reporting
Nigeria
Suicide
WHO guidelines

Anmerkungen:

Date Completed 11.10.2021

Date Revised 07.12.2022

published: Print-Electronic

Citation Status MEDLINE

doi:

10.1177/0020764020963356

funding:

Förderinstitution / Projekttitel:

PPN (Katalog-ID):

NLM315935421