During the holidays, many in the press write stories aiming to help readers cope with the blues and other seasonal conditions. But some journalists inadvertently support a myth about the holidays and suicide, or quote well-intentioned sources who should know better.
Despite the fact that the holiday season has some of the lowest average daily suicide rates, some journalists continue to perpetuate the holiday-suicide myth.
In the 2017-18 holiday season, two-thirds of the print news and feature stories that mentioned both the holidays and suicide drew a false connection between them, according to the latest analysis by the Annenberg Public Policy Center of the University of Pennsylvania. The analysis was based on stories in the Nexis database and excluded coincidental references.
The result was unchanged from the prior holiday season. Of the 31 stories examined, 65 percent supported the holiday-suicide myth, while 35 percent debunked it. An additional 32 stories made coincidental reference to holidays and suicide and were excluded. (See figure 1.)
“Although many of the stories supporting the myth were published in rural areas, we hope that greater awareness of actual suicide risk will help residents of those regions to better cope with whatever stresses they might experience during the holiday period,” said Dan Romer, research director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center (APPC).
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.