Tabloids and suicide: Dangerous trampling on everyone's dignity

Throughout yesterday, the tabloids were flooded with details about the suicide of the child of a famous politician. We know, dear readers, that you probably know who it is, it is impossible to avoid that information. But we will deliberately keep it quiet, because we still believe in the idea that compassion and preserving dignity, both our own and others', are part of the job description of a journalist, along with everything else that goes into that job.

It has been available to the media in Serbia since 2005 in the Serbian language World Health Organization suicide reporting manual. When comparing this manual and the way tabloids in Serbia report, it seems as if they read it well, studied it and made a conscious decision to do everything the other way around. There is no other explanation, because it is beautifully written: do not put on the front pages, do not publish photos of the deceased or farewell letters, do not describe the way...

The greatest value of this manual is not that it tells what to do and what not to do, but that it explains the most important thing: why certain things should not be done at all.

Such reporting on suicide, as we have in Serbia, leads to the direct danger of those who are at risk of suicide. The "Werther effect" is the name given to the phenomenon of an increased number of suicides when one specific case is widely and incorrectly reported. For a long time it was considered that the "Werther effect" was an insufficiently studied and proven phenomenon, but in the last five years the number of scientific studies on it has increased, so now we can already say that exact evidence exists.

One of the more recent studies by the Department of Social and Preventive Medicine of the Medical University of Vienna, published in 2019, consolidated the findings of more than 50 studies studying the "Werther effect". Conclusion: news about a famous person's suicide increases the risk of suicide by 13 percent for those who have a predisposition to it, and this effect lasts up to 60 days from the moment of publication. If the method is also described in the media, the risk increases to 30 percent.

In all studies, it was especially emphasized that media content that is published in written form is more dangerous than video and audio: it can be saved, read again, cut from a newspaper or printed from a website... Although the phenomenon was named after a fictional character, Goethe's young Werther , studies show that fictional contents in which suicide appears (series, films, literature) do not affect the increase in the number of suicides.

Yes, manuals, research and studies are dry and boring: why would anyone look at statistical data and statements by experts when every Serbian tabloid nicely offers him a picture from the scene, the last message of the deceased, and promises the reaction of family members in the title... Well, because that's how saves lives and preserves the mental health of the audience. Is there a more important purpose than that?

Unfortunately, it seems that there is: for tabloids in Serbia, the reader is not a human being, a person with weaknesses, traumas and problems and, of course, with the value that every human being carries inside. For them, the reader is just a click, a figure that promises profit, a contract with an advertiser when the media boasts that it has so many hundreds of thousands of visits to the site. For them, the reader is a prey that should be grabbed by predatory techniques, by playing the card of the lowest urges of human curiosity, and along the way humiliate him, reduce him to a voyeur, a consumer of someone else's misfortune, kill his dignity, without even knowing what happened to him.

Dignity is the key word: it must be trampled on by every participant in this sick game. They will also humiliate the suicide victim by transcribing her or his life, publishing the smallest details, posts from social networks, photos, family tree, pictures from the place where it happened. Family members were humiliated and trampled on - here's what the deceased's sister said (she asked them to leave her alone), here's what the mother was wearing when the police told her what happened (yes, it was really published yesterday what kind of clothes she was wearing a woman when she was informed that her son had died)...

In the end, the journalist who went to the scene was also humiliated. But he himself agreed to it, he humiliated himself and trampled on his own dignity the moment he stepped out of the newsroom and headed towards the apartment of the deceased. He reduced himself to a vulture when he approached the place where everything happened, knocked on the family's door, stopped the neighbor, photographed the place where the deceased died. I turned off the last shred of humanity in me when he apologized for what he was doing and said it was his job. No, that's not his job. There is no job whose description does not say: do no harm. Or: do as little damage as possible.

Many yesterday and today on social media wondered how these people go home, hug their children or parents, how they eat and sleep. Unfortunately, there is every chance that they don't have a problem with that. Once the border is crossed, once the basic principle of humanity is violated, there is no border anymore. But this is not freedom, but riotousness, similar to that with which frenzied mobs of barbarians break and demolish everything in front of them, without realizing that the consequences even exist. They do not see a human being in front of them: just as the reader is not a person, neither the deceased nor his family are people for them, but prey. And beasts are lurking, not people.

Whether he will be a beast or a man, each of us can decide for ourselves. Well, you decide. Because the "Werther effect" is real, so even though you may not see the blood on your own hands, it's there.

If you need help: National SOS line for suicide prevention - 011/7777-000 (24 hours)/Unbreakable - 0800 001 002 (24 hours)/Heart Center - 0800 300 303 (from 14:23 to XNUMX:XNUMX)

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