Coverage of Robin Williams' Suicide in Australian Newspapers.

Background: Australia's Mindframe guidelines provide media professionals with advice on ways to safely report on suicide. Aims: We aimed to examine the extent to which Australian newspaper articles on Robin Williams' suicide conformed to the Mindframe recommendations. Method: We searched Factiva for relevant articles appearing in Australian newspapers during the 5 months following Williams' death on August 11, 2014. We retrieved the text of these articles from Factiva and, wherever possible, sourced scanned copies from the National Library of Australia. Trained coders rated the articles for quality, using a 10-item coding framework derived from the Mindframe guidelines. Results: Our search yielded 303 articles. In general, there were high levels of adherence to the Mindframe guidelines, with 67% of articles adhering to at least eight (80%) of the Mindframe guidelines. Limitations: We may have missed some articles and the coders' task involved some subjective judgments. Conclusion: Australian newspaper reporting of Robin Williams' suicide was largely consistent with the Mindframe guidelines. In particular, there was good adherence to recommendations designed to minimize the risk of imitative acts, which is positive. The poorer performance of articles in terms of recommendations to do with public education about suicide may be a missed opportunity.

Malaysian Stakeholder Perspectives on Suicide-Related Reporting: Findings From Focus Group Discussions.

Media guidelines on safe suicide-related reporting are within the suicide prevention armamentarium. However, implementation issues beleaguer real-world practice. This study evaluated the perspectives of the Malaysian media community, persons with lived experience of suicidal behavior (PLE), and mental health professionals (MHP) on suicide-related reporting in terms of the impact, strategies, challenges, and the implementation of guidelines on safe reporting. Three focus group discussions of purposively sampled Malaysian media practitioners (n = 8), PLE (n = 6), and MHP (n = 7) were audio-recorded, transcribed, coded and thematically analyzed. Inclusion criteria were: English fluency, no clinical depression or suicidal ideation (current), no recent previous suicide attempts or suicide bereavement. Three major themes emerged: (1) Unsafe Reporting; (2) Impact; and (3) Safe Reporting. Most described current reporting as unsafe by being potentially triggering to media users and may contribute to contagion effect. Positive impacts identified included raised awareness toward suicide and its prevention. Unsafe reporting was attributed to inadequate awareness, knowledge, and guidance, lack of empathy and accountability, job-related factors, popularity-seeking, lack of monitoring and governance, and information source(s) with unsafe content. Majority agreed on how suicide stories should be framed to produce a safe report. The media community diverged on how detailed a suicide story should be. Safe reporting challenges included difficulties in balancing beneficial versus harmful details, social media ubiquity and its citizen reporters. Participants suggested these safe reporting strategies: stakeholder engagement, educational approaches, improving governance and surveillance, and guidelines revision. Most acknowledged the relevance of guidelines but were unaware of the existence of local guidelines. Implementation challenges included the dilemma in balancing media industry needs vis-à-vis safe reporting requirements, stakeholder engagement difficulties and social media regulation. There is poor awareness regarding safe suicide-related reporting across all groups. PLE and MHP were negatively impacted by current unsafe messaging which aggravated trauma and grief reactions. Postvention support gaps for mental health professionals were highlighted. Safe reporting promotion strategies should include stakeholder engagement to increase awareness on minimizing Werther and maximizing Papageno effects. Strategic re-examination and dissemination of local media guidelines to address new media issues, and effective surveillance mechanisms, are crucial in sustainable improvement of safe reporting practices.

Effectiveness of a Malaysian Media Intervention Workshop: Safe Reporting on Suicide.

Background: Suicide remains an important cause of premature deaths and draws much media attention. However, unsafe reporting and portrayal of suicides by the media have been associated with increased risk of suicidal behavior. Current evidence suggests that media capacity-building could potentially prevent suicide. However, there are still knowledge gaps in terms of a lack of data on effective strategies for improving awareness and safe reporting of suicide-related media content. This study aims to investigate the effectiveness of a workshop conducted with members of the media community on the safe reporting of suicide-related content. Methods: An interventional single-arm pre and post pilot study was conducted on a sample of the Malaysian media community recruited through purposive and snowball sampling. The media safe reporting workshop was conducted by a suicide prevention expert with a media industry background. Thirty participants completed a self-reported evaluation questionnaire on their awareness and knowledge of reporting on suicide-related media content; before and after the interventional workshop. Results: There was a significant difference between the total scores before and after the intervention, with a large effect size. Post-intervention scores were significantly improved in 8 items, namely those related to the reporting of: (i) the content of any suicide note; (ii) headlines with methods of suicide; (iii) headlines with the location of suicide; (iv) cases of suspected suicide despite the unconfirmed cause of death; (v) suicide news to cater to readers' interests; (vi) cause of suicide; (vii) details of the location of suicide; and (viii) the negative impact to media community when reporting suicide stories. In particular, there was an improvement in the majority of items for people from the media community with no lived experience of suicidal behavior. Conclusion: The media safe reporting workshop is a potentially effective intervention for improving awareness and knowledge measures relating to safe reporting on suicide among the media community, with a more pronounced effect in those without lived experience of suicidal behavior. Limitations in the sample size, generalizability, short-term evaluation, and lack of a control group warrant future larger, longer-term controlled, and more representative studies.

Calls to helplines in Australia following media reports of Robin Williams' suicide.

OBJECTIVE: In the United States, there was an increase in calls to helplines following media reporting of Robin Williams' suicide. We aimed to determine whether this was the case in Australia. METHOD: The helpline services Lifeline and Beyond Blue provided us with weekly data on calls received for 2013-2015. We conducted interrupted time series regression analyses to determine whether there was an increase in the average weekly number of calls received by each helpline in two periods after the story about Williams' suicide broke (1 week and 4 weeks). RESULTS: We found strong evidence of an increase in calls to Lifeline (incidence rate ratio [IRR] =1.13; 95% confidence interval [CI] =1.02-1.25; p = 0.016) and Beyond Blue (IRR = 1.32; 95% CI = 1.09-1.59; p = 0.004) in the week after Williams' suicide was first reported. We found no evidence of higher than normal call volumes for Lifeline (IRR = 1.04; 95% CI = 0.99-1.10; p = 0.104) or Beyond Blue (IRR = 1.10; 95% CI = 1.00-1.22; p = 0.058) over the four weeks following Williams' death, however, suggesting that calls leveled out over this period. CONCLUSION: Suicide prevention experts and media professionals must work together to minimize the negative impacts of reports on suicide and maximize their positive ones. In cases where the story is likely to receive extensive international coverage, it may be important for local media to encourage help-seeking.

Suicides in Australia following media reports of the death of Robin Williams.

OBJECTIVE: This study assessed the extent to which local reporting of Robin Williams' suicide (on 11 August 2014) was associated with suicide in Australia. It followed several studies in the United States which showed that there were significant increases in suicide following media reports of Williams' death and that those media reports were less than optimal in terms of adherence to best-practice guidelines. In a previous study, we demonstrated that Australian media reports of Williams' suicide were largely adherent with our Mindframe guidelines on responsible reporting of suicide, so we speculated that there would be no increase in suicide following the reporting of Williams' suicide in Australia. METHOD: We extracted data on Australian suicides from the National Coroners Information System for the period 2001 to 2016. We conducted interrupted time series regression analyses to determine whether there were changes in suicides in the 5-month period immediately following Williams' suicide. RESULTS: Our hypothesis that there would be no increase in suicides in Australia following Williams' highly publicised suicide was not supported. There was an 11% increase in suicides in the 5-month period following Williams' death, largely accounted for by men aged 30-64 and by people who died by hanging (the method Williams used). CONCLUSION: It may be that Australians were exposed to reports that contravened safe reporting recommendations, particularly via overseas media or social media, and/or that some Australian reports may have had unhelpful overarching narratives, despite largely adhering to the Mindframe guidelines. The Mindframe guidelines constitute international best practice but consideration should be given to whether certain recommendations within them should be further reinforced and whether more nuanced information about how stories should be framed could be provided. Future revision and augmentation of the Mindframe guidelines should, as always, involve media professionals.

Detecting false positives in multielement designs: implications for brief assessments.

The authors assessed the extent to which multielement designs produced false positives using continuous duration recording (CDR) and interval recording with 10-s and 1-min interval sizes. Specifically, they created 6,000 graphs with multielement designs that varied in the number of data paths, and the number of data points per data path, using a random number generator. In Experiment 1, the authors visually analyzed the graphs for the occurrence of false positives. Results indicated that graphs depicting only two sessions for each condition (e.g., a control condition plotted with multiple test conditions) produced the highest percentage of false positives for CDR and interval recording with 10-s and 1-min intervals. Conversely, graphs with four or five sessions for each condition produced the lowest percentage of false positives for each method. In Experiment 2, they applied two new rules, which were intended to decrease false positives, to each graph that depicted a false positive in Experiment 1. Results showed that application of new rules decreased false positives to less than 5% for all of the graphs except for those with two data paths and two data points per data path. Implications for brief assessments are discussed.