Sharma Pawan, Timasina Ravi Raj, Singh Swarndeep, Gyawali Shreeya, Marahatta Kedar, Arafat S M Yasir
Patan Academy of Health Sciences, Lalitpur, Nepal.
Gandaki Medical College Teaching Hospital, Pokhara, Nepal.
Psychiatry J. 2022 Jul 7;2022:5708092. doi: 10.1155/2022/5708092. eCollection 2022.
Suicide is a major public health concern. Sensible media reporting of suicide is one of the important prevention strategies. There has been no report assessing the quality of media reporting of suicide in Nepal. We aimed to assess the quality of newspaper reporting of suicide in Nepal against the World Health Organization (WHO) reporting guidelines.
We undertook a content analysis study of articles from the online archives on reporting of suicide deaths in six English language (daily or weekly) newspapers published in Nepal over the two-year duration from a period between January 1, 2019, and December 31, 2020. Also, we compared them with the World Health Organization (WHO) guidelines.
A total of 165 English newspaper articles reporting on suicide were analyzed. 163 (98.8%) of news were published in the main section of the newspaper, and the mean length was 17.6 sentences. The name and age of the person who died of suicide were mentioned in about 69.1% ( = 114) and 53.3% ( = 88) articles, respectively. The most common method of suicide reported in the news articles was hanging (45.5%, = 75), followed by poisoning (11.5%, = 19). About 97.6% ( = 161) of news articles violated the recommendation provided in the WHO guidelines.
The adherence to the WHO guidelines for media reporting of suicide in Nepal was found to be poor, with a large majority of news reports having at least one potentially harmful media characteristic. Only a small minority of news reports included potentially helpful information to prevent suicide.
自杀是一个重大的公共卫生问题。媒体对自杀进行合理报道是重要的预防策略之一。尼泊尔尚未有评估媒体自杀报道质量的报告。我们旨在对照世界卫生组织（WHO）的报道指南，评估尼泊尔报纸对自杀事件的报道质量。
我们对2019年1月1日至2020年12月31日期间尼泊尔出版的六份英文（日报或周报）报纸在线存档中关于自杀死亡报道的文章进行了内容分析研究。此外，我们将它们与世界卫生组织（WHO）的指南进行了比较。
共分析了165篇关于自杀的英文报纸文章。163篇（98.8%）新闻发表在报纸的主要版面，平均长度为17.6句话。分别约有69.1%（n = 114）和53.3%（n = 88）的文章提到了自杀者的姓名和年龄。新闻报道中最常见的自杀方式是上吊（45.5%，n = 75），其次是中毒（11.5%，n = 19）。约97.6%（n = 161）的新闻文章违反了WHO指南中的建议。
尼泊尔媒体对自杀报道遵循WHO指南的情况较差，绝大多数新闻报道至少具有一种潜在有害的媒体特征。只有极少数新闻报道包含了预防自杀的潜在有用信息。
