Keeping Pace With Current Issues in Reporting Suicide and Mental Illness

This paper will highlight some of the complexities associated with the reporting of suicide & mental illness. Australia journalists indicated issues become more problematic when they are required to report suicides in other contexts such as murder-suicides, deaths in custody, & voluntary euthanasia. Similarly, the reporting of mental ilness was more complex in the context of crime & in reporting on the mental health care system. The authors discuss how the Response Ability project responded through the development of supplementary resources to allow educators to raise such issues with students. (30 refs.)