Reporters surrounded Ottawa Senators coach Cory Clouston
after his team’s 2-0 win over the Boston Bruins last Saturday. Rather than a
soundbite, Clouston told reporters the team’s assistant coach, Luke Richardson,
lost his daughter to suicide the night before. Silence crushed the room, but it
didn’t last. The local papers, the Ottawa Citizen and the Ottawa Sun,
covered it heavily. That was expected since
Richardson is legend in Ottawa, where he grew up, played Junior B with the
Ottawa West Golden Knights before playing 21 years in the NHL. To their credit,
the Richardson family opened up to the media in order to discuss the problem of
suicide. On Wednesday, The Globe and
Mail printed an article about the public memorial service for Daron Richardson,
who hung herself last Friday, on the front page. Front-page suicide coverage
is unheard of in Canada. Then Thursday, The Globe's Zosia Bielski wrote an article about the lack of suicide coverage.
These articles focused on the
devastation suicide wreaks, and the consequences of ignoring it. That’s
the media’s fault. Journalists have long bowed to psychiatrists's rhetoric about the contagion effect, which says more suicides will occur after sensational media
coverage. Some articles suggested it’s now time to cover suicide, and others
talk about the risks associated with an open discussion. News organizations
have long avoided suicide unless it happens to a public figure, in a
public place or is a murder-suicide. Richardson’s daughter falls into the public
figure category, making it a no-brainer as a news story. But why hasn’t the
media challenged this long-held idea of avoidance? It’s a huge problem in this
country—3611 people killed themselves in 2007, the latest year for national
data.
Our cover story in the upcoming Ryerson Review of Journalism, which launches on December 14,
challenges journalists to report suicides. Our six-month investigation
included nearly 80 interviews where we demanded some of Canada’s leading
psychiatrists explain the copycat effect in the digital age of 24-hour news, Facebook and
Twitter. Do old scientific studies hold true today? Journalists
from across the country, family members of suicide victims and the police also
weigh in on the controversial subject. The results are
surprising.