The following guidance is taken from Samaritans, NUJ and World Health Organisation media guidelines for reporting suicide. We recommend reading these in full.
Checklist for reporting a death by suicide:
- remember suicide is only confirmed by a coroner
- start with a content warning and support statement
- use a factual headline like ‘Man dies in Dorset town centre’
- put the cause of the death, if confirmed, in the story not the headline
- use factual language from our Wordbook
- refer to suicide being preventable and include examples of positive coping during moments of crisis
- use proportionate coverage and placement in your publications
- consider switching off comments on digital channels
- do not speculate or repeat others’ speculation
- do not provide details of the method
- do not repeat extracts from suicide notes or similar
- do not provide the exact location or location images
- do not link to previous stories about suicide
Remember to check our Wordbook for copy, words and phrases for talking about suicide.