Newspaper reporting of suicide in Nepal: Quality assessment against World Health Organization media guidelines

Sensible media reporting of suicide is a population-based suicide prevention strategy. However, the quality of media reporting of suicide has not been assessed in Nepal.

We aimed to assess the newspaper reporting status of suicide in Nepal with reference to World Health Organization (WHO) media guidelines for suicide reporting.

We retrospectively searched eight major newspapers in Nepal between January 2020 and May 2021 and assessed 167 news reports against WHO suicide reporting guidelines.

Potentially harmful characteristics were found to be reported in both the title and main text of the reports. About half of them mentioned sex (48.5%) and 38.3% mentioned the location of suicide in the title. Of the 167 reports, 74.3%, 95.2%, 34.7%, 92.2%, 98.8%, and 52.7% mentioned the name, sex, occupation, method of suicide, the location of suicide, and life events, respectively, in their main content. On the other hand, only 6% and 2.4% of reports mentioned linkage of suicides with mental illness and substance abuse, respectively. While lesser than 1% of reports narrated educative information regarding suicide prevention, none mentioned contact information for help-seeking for the vulnerable.

Newspaper reporting of suicide in Nepal poorly adheres to WHO guidelines, substantiated by the high presence of potentially harmful characteristics and negligible presence of potentially helpful characteristics.