• What's the Story? Reporting mental health and suicide
• At a glance
• The handbook
  • Foreword
  • Introduction
    • It could be you...
    • Why else should you care?
  • 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

Why else should you care?

These are some other reasons which reporting on mental health is so important and why it makes sense to take care about how you cover it:

• One in six of us - nearly 10 million people across the UK - will be experiencing a mental health problem at any one time (The ONS Psychiatric Morbidity report) and worldwide depression is predicted to be the second biggest cause of death and disability in the world (World Health Report, World Health Organisation 2001).
• Mental health is now an important issue, not just for readers and viewers, but for businesses, opinion formers and government. Some experts suggest a nation’s success should not be measured in Gross Domestic Product but in terms of the overall emotional well-being of the nation (The King of Bhutan coined the phrase ‘Gross Domestic Happiness’ in 1972. In the UK, the New Economics Foundation think tank has championed the idea of measuring wellbeing instead of wealth, alongside leading economist Lord Richard Layard. DEFRA’s Sustainable Development Unit published measures of UK wellbeing for the first time in 2007.).
• Most people, 84% of the general public, think that people with mental health problems have been the subject of discrimination for too long (Survey of Attitudes Toward Mental Illness, Department of Health 2007).
• International evidence shows that taking care over how you report suicide can prevent copycat suicides and save lives.
• You can make a difference as a journalist by helping to reduce stigma - the number one factor in improving the lives of people with mental health problems (National phone-in Survey, SANE, Australia 2000).
• You can also help challenge the discrimination people with mental health problems face. With the highest rate of unemployment among people with disabilities, 34% have been unfairly sacked or forced to resign from a job (Stigma of Mental Illness: Changing Minds, Changing Behaviour, British Journal of Psychiatry; Peter Byrne, 1999).
• It’s a professional responsibility. All the major professional codes for the media, and many in-house guidelines, include strong guidance on accuracy, privacy and non-discrimination.
• There are lots of untold stories out there. A survey by Shift in 2006 found that only 6% of media coverage contained the voice of people with mental health problems (Mind Over Matter: Improving Media Reporting of Mental Health, Shift 2006).
• Words like ‘loony’, ‘schizo’ and ‘nutter’, still appear in the press and cause offence to people with mental health problems. The use of equivalent words for issues like sexuality, disability or race is unacceptable – these terms also have no place in our media.

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