Related Experiment Video
Updated: Jun 22, 2025

Design and Implementation of an fMRI Study Examining Thought Suppression in Young Women with, and At-risk, for Depression
Published on: May 19, 2015
News Media Framing of Suicide Circumstances and Gender: Mixed Methods Analysis
Jasmine C Foriest1,2, Shravika Mittal1, Eugenia Kim1
1School of Interactive Computing, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA, United States.
Background:
Suicide is a leading cause of death worldwide. Journalistic reporting guidelines were created to curb the impact of unsafe reporting; however, how suicide is framed in news reports may differ by important characteristics such as the circumstances and the decedent's gender.
Objective:
This study aimed to examine the degree to which news media reports of suicides are framed using stigmatized or glorified language and differences in such framing by gender and circumstance of suicide.
Methods:
We analyzed 200 news articles regarding suicides and applied the validated Stigma of Suicide Scale to identify stigmatized and glorified language. We assessed linguistic similarity with 2 widely used metrics, cosine similarity and mutual information scores, using a machine learning-based large language model.
Results:
News reports of male suicides were framed more similarly to stigmatizing (P<.001) and glorifying (P=.005) language than reports of female suicides. Considering the circumstances of suicide, mutual information scores indicated that differences in the use of stigmatizing or glorifying language by gender were most pronounced for articles attributing legal (0.155), relationship (0.268), or mental health problems (0.251) as the cause.
Conclusions:
Linguistic differences, by gender, in stigmatizing or glorifying language when reporting suicide may exacerbate suicide disparities.
Related Concept Videos
Framing Effects
Panic Disorder
Relationship Formation
Comparing the Survival Analysis of Two or More Groups
Socioemotional Experience and Gender Development
Surveys

