TY  - JOUR
AU  - Foriest, Jasmine C
AU  - Mittal, Shravika
AU  - Kim, Eugenia
AU  - Carmichael, Andrea
AU  - Lennon, Natalie
AU  - Sumner, Steven A
AU  - De Choudhury, Munmun
PY  - 2024
DA  - 2024/7/3
TI  - News Media Framing of Suicide Circumstances and Gender: Mixed Methods Analysis
JO  - JMIR Ment Health
SP  - e49879
VL  - 11
KW  - suicide
KW  - framing
KW  - disparities
KW  - reporting guidelines
KW  - gender
KW  - stigma
KW  - glorification
KW  - glorify
KW  - glorifying
KW  - suicidal
KW  - self harm
KW  - suicides
KW  - stigmatizing
KW  - stigmatization
KW  - reporting
KW  - news
KW  - journalist
KW  - journalists
KW  - journalism
KW  - machine learning
KW  - NLP
KW  - natural language processing
KW  - LLM
KW  - LLMs
KW  - language model
KW  - language models
KW  - linguistic
KW  - linguistics
KW  - reporter
KW  - reporters
KW  - digital mental health
KW  - mHealth
KW  - media
AB  - 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. 
SN  - 2368-7959
UR  - https://mental.jmir.org/2024/1/e49879
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2196/49879
DO  - 10.2196/49879
ID  - info:doi/10.2196/49879
ER  -