Accepted for/Published in: JMIR Mental Health
Date Submitted: Sep 19, 2023
Date Accepted: Mar 25, 2024
Warning: This is an author submission that is not peer-reviewed or edited. Preprints - unless they show as "accepted" - should not be relied on to guide clinical practice or health-related behavior and should not be reported in news media as established information.
Framing of Suicide Circumstances by Gender: Stigmatization and Glorification in News Media
ABSTRACT
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 and decent gender.
Objective:
This paper aims 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 (SOSS) to identify stigmatized and glorified language. We assessed linguistic similarity with two 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 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.
Citation
Request queued. Please wait while the file is being generated. It may take some time.
Copyright
© The authors. All rights reserved. This is a privileged document currently under peer-review/community review (or an accepted/rejected manuscript). Authors have provided JMIR Publications with an exclusive license to publish this preprint on it's website for review and ahead-of-print citation purposes only. While the final peer-reviewed paper may be licensed under a cc-by license on publication, at this stage authors and publisher expressively prohibit redistribution of this draft paper other than for review purposes.