Reporting aims to avoid adding more tragedy

So while I'm still here livin', I guess I will live on.

I could've died for love, but for livin' I was born.

You might hear me holler and you might hear me cry.

But I'll be dogged, sweet baby, if you're gonna see me die.

Life is fine. Fine as wine.

Life is fine.

- Langston Hughes

In Hughes' famous poem, a desperately suicidal character finds after two failed attempts that, to quote a different poet, for all its sham, drudgery and broken dreams, this is still a beautiful world. If only newspapers could write more about people who make that discovery.

They, however, move on with their lives despite their struggles, while the ones who come to the public's attention are those who do not. And, it is a sad fact of life that the acts of these despondent individuals have a way of influencing others, potentially compounding tragedy upon tragedy.

For that reason, the Daily Herald resists publicizing suicides. But sometimes, a self-inflicted death cannot be ignored, and suddenly we seem to find ourselves with an unhappy abundance of those times.

To list the deaths involving suicide of the past few months risks diminishing them through a morbid, academic recitation. They are many, and you know their stories. They include families in which no trouble was suspected and struggling individuals whose choice could, after the fact, be explained if not understood. They include people in very public trouble with the government and respected public servants whose inner turmoil was recognized only too late.

When I first wrote many years ago of the media's reticence to report on suicides, an activist in the subject contacted me to urge otherwise. Publicity, he said, can bring awareness to the prevalence of the subject and possibly influence potential victims to seek help. But, we still know too well the research linking publicity to copycat suicides.

Columbia University researcher Dr. Madelyn Gould referenced it just this week in an interview with National Public Radio. In studies of "cluster" suicide, she said, only one factor was consistently found - media attention.

"The size of the increase in suicides following a suicide story is proportional to the amount, and the duration, and the prominence of the coverage," Gould said, though in the same NPR story Paula Clayton, medical director of the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention, said reporting can help if coverage includes the factors leading to a death and the fact that "90 percent of people who kill themselves have an underlying mental health problem."

Clayton cautions against reporting on a method of death, showing where it occurred or, especially, glorifying it. This is advice we take to heart when a story of suicide must be told. You saw it, for example, in the way Christy Gutowski's report this week on the funeral following the Addison family tragedy emphasized the strength and unity of the survivors without minimizing their unimaginable sense of loss.

In even the best of times, the rigors of life can become too much for some people to take and these, of course, are not the best of times. We resist publicizing such cases unless they happen publicly, involve well-known subjects or include other deaths, and we design the reporting we must do around sensitivity for survivors and concern for influencing others.

And, we never escape longing for more opportunities to describe those individuals who, at the extreme depths of life's hardships, have discovered its overriding joy.

• Jim Slusher is an assistant managing editor for the Daily Herald.