Suicide A strategy of silence
The internet age may have left a longtime authority behind, writes Adam Dudding.
There are tides in the public conversation about suicide in New Zealand, and right now the water’s right up to the seawall. Nigel Latta devoted a full episode to the subject in his primetime documentary series The Hard Stuff last year. In March, the glossy TV series 13 Reasons Why slipped into the country via Netflix, then earned a tailor-made, if toothless, ‘‘RP18’’ rating, due to concerns that it glamorised suicide.
In recent weeks the Government’s chief science adviser has released a discussion paper on youth suicide; a Taranaki headmaster’s speech to his students about suicide has been widely shared on social media; and Auckland’s Herald newspaper has published a series on youth suicide that includes photos of victims and detailed accounts of their family’s grieving. Unicef reported New Zealand had the highest youth suicide rate in the developed world.
But one of the more curious stories on the issue came in mid-July, when comedian-turned mental health campaigner Mike King said schools had cancelled his speaking engagements after being advised by the South Canterbury DHB, and its suicide prevention coordinator Professor Annette Beautrais, that it could be unwise for him to be talking to students. King claimed that Beautrais’s advice to the school showed she was promoting a ‘‘silent’’ approach to tackling suicide that was outdated and – judging by New Zealand’s stubbornly high suicide rate of more than 500 per year – apparently ineffective. Beautrais declined media requests to respond. This story was familiar in several ways: the presence of Beautrais as suicide expert, the criticism of her methods by someone who’s trying to tackle suicide from a non-academic perspective, and her reluctance to respond publicly. Saying ‘‘no’’ to a reporter is hardly unusual, but in the case of Beautrais, it’s complicated. For decades, she has been regarded as New Zealand’s leading suicidologist, an academic who’s been studying suicide and its prevention since 1991. She was director of the Canterbury Suicide Project until 2009, at which point she left the country, reportedly in despair at the difficulties of securing research funding. She’s since advised the World Health Organisation and the International Association for Suicide Prevention. On returning to New Zealand she has taken up the role at the South Canterbury DHB, run training programmes around the country and authored a report on rural suicide. She is also an adjunct professor at the University of Canterbury.
The significance of her relationship with media is that certain types of reporting have been shown by researchers to trigger copycat suicides when seen by vulnerable people – a so-called ‘‘contagion’’ effect. Based on that
I think the bigger world has passed her by.
Neil MacLean
research, Beautrais has long been a strong voice against irresponsible media coverage.
But somehow, a concern about contagion appears to have morphed into a more general distaste for, and distrust of, media. She declined to talk to the Sunday Star-Times for this story, and to Press reporter Matt Philp in 2007 for a similar feature. In 2006, she expressed her frustrations to a Herald reporter: ‘‘I know the way journalists write . . . I object to the fact that you can find anyone in the community who has an opinion on suicide, and then you ring me up and give my opinion equal weight.’’
Friction with media might seem trivial, but this matters. Because right now those who say media must shut up about suicide seem to be losing the argument. Highprofile public figures – not just Mike King and other community campaigners, but former coroners – have lost faith with a ‘‘don’t-talkabout-it’’ approach. New Zealand has some of the strictest rules in the world about media reporting of suicide, but they were slightly relaxed last year and are often broken without penalty.
If one of Beautrais’s goals has been to keep media on the straight and narrow, it seems she’s losing the fight. So has she been going about it the wrong way?
Neil MacLean first encountered Beautrais when he was Christchurch coroner, and she was running the Canterbury Suicide Project. He has great respect for her research and reputation in the field, but came to disagree about just how silent media should be. When the Ministry of Health softened media guidelines, ‘‘I remember that she and others were very critical that the ministry and others had been conned by the media into doing something very unwise’’.
MacLean was chief coroner from 2007 to 2015, and in 2010 began releasing annual suicide statistics. He was criticised for doing so, but ‘‘I watched out with special interest to see what happened. And the answer was nothing. The suicide statistics carried on exactly as they had before.’’
MacLean isn’t challenging the accuracy of the academic research but he doesn’t believe it’s always relevant. He says academics have relied on ‘‘historical stuff’’ such as a spike in a particular method of suicide in Hong Kong after a highly publicised death in 1998.
‘‘But translating it to New Zealand, I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything that would suggest that anything that’s been published has actually led to an increase of suicides,’’ he says.
‘‘There’s not doubt there is a contagion effect, particularly amongst young people if someone commits suicide and somebody else close to them knows about it. There seems to be something going on that leads to imitation. But that’s nothing to do with what’s coming out publicly.’’
The way he sees it, Beautrais’s perfectly legitimate concern about contagion and copycat suicides ‘‘became more broadly a view that there should be no discussion, that even releasing up-to-date suicide statistics is dangerous’’.
And these days, says Maclean, the internet and social media make attempts to control information more futile than ever: ‘‘I think the bigger world has passed her by.’’
Last week the Government’s chief science adviser, Peter Gluckman, released a discussion paper on youth suicide that talked briefly about the risks of media reporting. Gluckman told the Sunday Star-Times that although Beautrais hadn’t been directly consulted for the paper, its conclusions align closely with hers, simply because both it and Beautrais rely on the same scientific evidence.
He says the most definitive summary is in a 2015 report from Public Health England, which says the risks around media coverage of a suicide increase when it is frequent, when it is on the front page, when the word ‘‘suicide’’ is in the headline, when it states or implies the method, and when it glorifies the suicide or the grieving family and friends.
All the same, says Gluckman, ‘‘it’s possible to have quite serious discussions of suicide without talking about those things’’.
He has been concerned by shows such as 13 Reasons Why, and by some recent media stories containing details about specific suicides. Yet he is happy that the community is having a conversation about suicide in a way it never has before.
One enthusiastic defender of Beautrais’s approach is Nigel Latta. He is in the curious position of being someone in media who fronted an entire documentary episode about suicide, complete with interviews with grieving relatives and mournful recitations of worrying statistics, that didn’t get any criticism from Beautrais.
In fact, says Latta, not only did he interview Beautrais on-camera as New Zealand’s acknowledged suicide-prevention expert, he also gave her full editorial control over the final edit of the entire episode. He did that to ensure the documentary wasn’t going to risk the very lives that it was trying to help save.
Latta says Beautrais has been ‘‘burnt’’ when trying to talk to media before, which has made her cautious, but the criticisms of her are often unfair.
‘‘She gets attacked as if it’s her opinion. People describe it like it’s some sort of cult – the Beautraisians or whatever – but this is not ‘Annette Beautrais makes up a bunch of shit and just says it’. She’s part of international panels, and has published, and reads the actual journals. It’s all very well for someone who doesn’t read those journals, or who doesn’t go to those conferences, to say ‘I disagree’, but I’m putting my money on her.’’
What about the accusation that Beautrais and like-minded academics are out of touch with the public, and with the families who just want to talk about their suffering, without being told to shut up?
Nothing could be further from the truth, says Latta. ‘‘It pains me that she’s painted as this dispassionate academic when she is the opposite: she’s a deeply compassionate person.’’
King says Beautrais wants to stifle debate about suicide. From where he sits, it looks like she thinks ‘‘that if you say the S-word people will pick up on it and they will try to kill themselves’’.
MacLean says calls for media silence about suicide remind him of the mystery and confusion of HIV/Aids in the 1980s, where there was ‘‘suppression and burying of heads in the sand’’ – a situation that improved only when people challenged the silence and started talking about practical responses.
But Latta insists Beautrais’s goal isn’t silence at all. Yes, she wants to block those aspects of suicide reporting that are dangerous. But the central message in the doco was that certain conversations should be actively encouraged.
There seems a great distance between Latta’s view of the cautious expert, and Beautrais as perceived by King, or MacLean, and some reporters: a prickly and incommunicative expert who wants to shut down debate. Could she perhaps do with some pointers on how to get the media onside?
Latta says Beautrais told him she believed media can play a positive role in this issue, ‘‘but she just has a low trust, based on actual experience, that that will happen’’.
And yes, says Latta, ‘‘It is important to communicate science in a way that people can understand and make sense of. But she’s someone who’s been personally attacked for a long time, and she’s only human …
‘‘If she cared less, she’d just go and do something easier. She’s doing this because she thinks it’s important that we follow the evidence and do the stuff that’s safe.’’