Suicides Reported

Suicide is the act of deliberately killing oneself. It is a worldwide and vital public health problem. According to the statistics from WHO, the number of people who successfully committed suicide has reached up to 1.2 million, while the people who failed are ten even twenty times more than that. The statistics from Beijing psychological crisis research and intervene center in 2003 shows that:there are 287,000 people died from suicide each year in China,2 million committed suicide but failed. Suicide has become the fifth in the sorting order of suicide reasons in China. Different from disease or other accidental death, suicide affects in many aspects. It not only hurt the person's relatives greatly, but badly influences the society.The media especially prefers suicide events because of the significance, conflicting dependency and unusualness of news. Many researches from abroad indicate that:improper reports of suicide would affect the people who have the idea of suicide. Thus it is likely to cause infection of suicide. Scholars in China have not done deep researches to this problem, that is, it has not reached an agreement on whether suicide news is the direct reason for the following suicides. However, the common view that the researchers have got is that:suicide news reports surely has sophisticated relationship with the following suicide events. In certain cases, the reporting of suicide may cause positive effect and also negative effect. Therefore, it is important to study news report of suicide.Most of the scholars studying this topic in China mainly focus on newspaper, but rarely on TV, internet and radio. The researchers think that newspaper badly twisted the reporting of suicide, such as purify suicide behavior, describe suicide details, simplify the reason of death and play up suicide events. This thesis takes TV media into consideration after summing up the problems of newspaper reports of suicide. The author finds out that the newspaper report of suicide has improved so much. The former problems such as purifying suicide behavior and playing up suicide events have rarely appeared. On the contrary, the problems caused by TV media are more extrude than that of newspaper. At the same time, it brings many new problems such as excessive interviewing, displaying bloody frames and reporting suicide events like a suspenseful story.This thesis also generalizes the status quo of newspaper and media reports of suicide events. The author believes that:the news source of suicide reporting is univocal. Most of them are got from the police; there are suicide news reported almost every day, so the frequency is high; there are little news for information and reporting for research. Most of them are reports of single case; weakening the identification of the suicide, such as college students, the white collar and the stars; the reports nearly conform to the abstract facts; TV media is more improper than newspaper.In view of the above questions and the status quo, this thesis provides some matching strategies for the reference of the media workers. The strategies are reducing the quantity of news reporting, weakening suicide reports, enrich the style and subjects, strengthening the ethic construction of media image, decreasing bloody frames and pictures and focusing on suicide phenomena but not play up suicide cases.