• What's the Story? Reporting mental health and suicide
• At a glance
• The handbook
  • Foreword
  • Introduction
  • Key facts about mental health
  • Care in and out of the community
  • Reporting mental health and violence
  • Violence: the other side of the story
  • Reporting suicide
  • Language and terminology
  • Industry codes of practice
  • Diagnoses
  • Contacts
• Shift Media Network

Industry codes of practice

Meeting the guidelines

Here is a selection of key extracts from and summaries of the relevant professional codes of practice and in-house guidelines.

The Press Complaints Commission’s Code of Practice

Clause 12 about discrimination states that the press must avoid prejudicial or pejorative reference to a person’s race, colour, religion, sex or sexual orientation, or to any physical or mental illness or disability. Details of an individual’s race, colour, religion, sexual orientation, physical or mental illness or disability must be avoided unless genuinely relevant to the story. Clause 5 states that when reporting suicide, care should be taken to avoid excessive detail about the method used.

In a Guidance note, the PCC gives more detailed advice, making clear that people detained under the Mental Health Act are ‘patients’, not ‘prisoners’, so language like ‘caged’ or ‘jailed’ is inaccurate. It warns against the use of terms such as ‘basket case’ or ‘nutter’, which may breach clause 12. It states: “Not only can such language cause distress to patients and their families, by interfering detrimentally with their care and treatment, it can also create a climate of public fear or rejection.”

The note can be found in full at the PCC website at www.pcc.org.uk/advice

“Discrimination on grounds of mental illness has no place in a modern society. Nor should it have a place in the media. Discriminatory or inaccurate descriptions of people with mental health problems can distress patients and contribute to a climate of public fear or rejection.”
Sir Christopher Meyer, Chairman of the PCC

The National Union of Journalists’ Code of Conduct

The code requires members to: produce no material likely to lead to hatred or discrimination on the grounds of a person’s age, gender, race, colour, creed, legal status, disability, marital status, or sexual orientation.

For the full code go to www.nuj.org.uk

“Press guidelines and codes of practice make it very clear that discrimination, distortion and inaccurate language have no place whatsoever in responsible reporting. The media has made good progress in upholding those standards on all sorts of issues. But when it comes to mental health, we all have a bit of catching up to do.”
Jeremy Dear, General Secretary of the NUJ

OFCOM Broadcasting Code

The code warns against the use of discriminatory language and says that methods of suicide or self-harm must not be portrayed or described in programmes except where editorially justified.

For the full code go to www.ofcom.org.uk

What's the Story: Reporting mental health and suicide: A resource for journalists and editors