Citation

Menon V, Arafat SMY, Akter H, Mukherjee S, Kar SK, Padhy SK. Asian J. Psychiatry 2020; 54: e102302.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2020, Elsevier Publishing)

DOI

10.1016/j.ajp.2020.102302

PMID

32674068

Abstract

A growing body of evidence suggests that media reporting of suicide in South-East Asia is imbalanced and poorly adherent to suicide reporting recommendations (Arafat et al., 2020b, 2020a); this is despite substantial evidence indicating a clear link between explicit media portrayals of suicides and the probability of copycat suicidal behaviour among vulnerable individuals (Pirkis et al., 2006). Media reporting of celebrity suicide is a phenomenon worthy of investigation due to its potential to trigger suicide contagion; these assertions are supported by studies which found nearly a 10% increase in suicides in the two months that followed the suicide of Robin Williams, a popular and acclaimed American entertainment celebrity (Fink et al., 2018).

To our knowledge, no published evidence exists on quality of media reporting of celebrity suicide in World Health Organization South-East Asian (WHO-SEA) region. To fill this gap in the evidence, we carried out the present research to assess and compare the quality of media reporting of celebrity suicide against WHO suicide reporting guidelines in India and Bangladesh; two neighbouring countries that share similar culture and appetite for Bollywood movies. To enhance comparability, we chose only media reports in Bangla; the predominant language spoken in Bangladesh as well as in the neighbouring state of West Bengal in India. The reference event was the suicide of Sushant Singh Rajput (SSR), a popular mainstream Bollywood actor, who committed suicide on June 14, 2020.

Two native Bangla speaking investigators searched online news portals of Indian and Bangladeshi Bangla newspapers and television channels to identify news articles that reported the celebrity suicide between...

Keywords: Werther effect

Language: en