The Sunday Mail
Mabasa Sasa Editor
Much of journalism is like police work.
With the police, you get the “routine” stuff: collaring public drinkers; dealing with people who can’t – or won’t – wait to get to a legal place to relieve their bladders; holding down troublesome teens for a couple of hours and hoping they realise they don’t want to graduate into a life of hard-core crime.
Journalism also comes with its “routine” stuff: the politician who – as Gareth Willard is wont to say – holds a media conference because he has donated a wheelbarrow to a community in Honde Valley; the farmer who believes that his neighbour’s cows straying into his field is a Government conspiracy; the fellow who thinks the presence of alien matter in his soft drink means the Coca-Cola Company is deliberately spreading cancer.
Then there is the stuff that keeps you up at night. For the police, it could be the spate of rapes in a particular locale, the brutal murder of a five-year-old who was all sweetness and whose parents were the salt of the earth.
It’s the stuff that keeps our hardworking, duty-sworn detectives up at night. They can’t let it go, even when no leads materialise and no track to the perpetrator makes itself apparent. It is the unsolved case that a detective, years after retiring, thinks about.
The detective yearns to know who did it and why. He always thinks perhaps he missed something or could have handled the case better. It’s the one that got away. The old scar that still itches. The ghost that is the first inhabitant of the haunted house.
Journalism also has its lingering itches. They stick in the gut like bad food. They breed sleepless nights. They are the hardworking, duty-sworn journalist’s ghosts in a haunted house. These are the stories that you can never quite get a handle on, the kind that keep coming back at you, even when you think you have safely tucked them away in what you think is a conscience-proofsteel cabinet in the deep sub-conscious.
I have my story that haunts me. It starts sometime in 2002, restless in a bedroom late at night at Baba and Amai Tafara’s house at Chidara School in Mutoko, scrounging for something new to read. The new something I find is something old.
It is a mid-90s copy of the Reader’s Digest, that once-brilliant amalgamation of global news fare that was to set my brother, Farai, down that road of academia that now has him reading for his PhD. In it is the story of Kevin Carter, the South African photojournalist who captured the haunting image of a hooded vulture, wings spread, behind a Sudanese child during the famine of 1993.
That was before The Sudan split. Carter won a Pulitzer Prize for that grim picture. But that image and many others of the horrors man can bring upon man weighed heavily on him. A few months after literally shooting his way to international stardom, Carter killed himself.
His friend, Judith Matloff, was to say Carter talked “about the guilt of the people he couldn’t save because he photographed them as they were being killed”.
Raised in the Seventh-Day Adventist Church, educated by Catholics, with an interest in psychoanalysis, and working in journalism, Carter’s “mortal sin” has long haunted me.
Why do people kill themselves?
One of the first op-ed pieces I wrote back in 2004 as a green journalist with The Mirror Newspapers Group was about what it is that drives people to suicide and how the media portray this “mortal sin”.
Recent news headlines and reportage have had me revisiting the issue more often, and much of the rest of this piece draws from that 2004 article. Most prominent of the recent reports have been about schoolchildren taking their own lives after being reportedly bullied or put under intense pressure to succeed or “fit in”.
Others have been of people who take their own lives reportedly because of marital and/or financial problems. So, are the media providing an adequate service to society in how they report on people killing themselves?
Studies show that the way suicides are covered has a great effect on future trends. A certain way of writing contributes to what behavioural scientists call “suicide contagion” or “copycat” suicides. Others will talk of this as the “Werther effect”, which is borrowed from Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s “The Sorrows of Young Werther”.
Research also shows that graphic descriptions of how people kill themselves and how “effective” the chosen method was fuels suicide contagion. People who are susceptible to self-destruction use these reports as “study guides” and can actually be encouraged to try the methods reported.
Consider this example from Austria in 1984-87 when Vienna-based journalists reported a surge in suicides in the city’s subways.
The reports were often dramatic and graphic – and the number of suicides rose. Training of journalists saw them change focus from the actual acts of suicide to the factors leading to self- destruction and how these could be best staved off.
Researchers noted a decline in the number of Viennese subway suicides. Too often, news reports offer “how-to” manuals that show how a person can kill him/herself. Much of the information is unnecessary.
Do we unwittingly romanticise suicide, make it appear as if in certain situations it is the only way out, much like young Werther?
Instead of delving into the factors that led to suicide, we in the media sometimes prefer to refer to the self-destruction as “inexplicable”.
There is need to balance a rational explanation with the commission of what is ultimately an irrational act.
It’s a fine line. Psychiatrists say there are always indicators of potential for self-destruction. We just choose to ignore or downplay them and thus leave our loved ones to stew in a personal hell that leads to tragedy.
That is not to say alarm bells should ring at the slightest sign of depression. No. But we really should start taking more notice about the feelings of those around us, and how mentally suited they are to changes in conditions and environment – be it social, financial or professional.
Statistics show that more than 90 percent of people who commit suicide have significant psychiatric illnesses that are usually related to mood disorders and/or substance abuse. How we report these issues should not necessarily create a bond between the deceased and the reader. The reader should not identify with the problem and think the suicide outcome was logical.
The reportage should simply create an understanding of the facts so that people are better equipped to help friends and family of people prone to suicide.
It has also been found that the number of stories the media carry about suicides and the importance attached to them (i.e front page headlines or top of the bulletin) also fuel contagion. Behavioural scientists recommend that the media not use the word “suicide” in headlines; and that in the story itself, reporters speak of “death by suicide” rather than “committed suicide”.
There is no need to talk of “successful suicides”. There should be greater focus on treatment of the early warning signs, the work of help centres/organisations, and the stories of those who overcame inclinations towards self-destruction. And there is no need to splash images of the scene.
In fact, psychiatrists say even use of “happier times” pictures of the deceased do not help. Images of the deceased as a healthy and happy person create the myth that suicide is normal and is a viable alternative when things go wrong.
There is nothing normal about self-destruction. We have also done a disservice in focusing on the lives of the people who commit suicide. More needs to be done about telling the story of the people left behind. How does the suicide affect them? How do their lives change?
Such focus will do a lot to dissuade people from killing themselves as they start to give greater weight to the burden they are leaving for their loved ones.
We don’t like talking about suicide, which is why we report on it badly. But it is a hooded vulture we need to confront.
