Can media depictions of suicide influence copycat acts?

Hong Kong’s print media have never shied away from using gruesome images to illustrate its news reports, but when Oriental Daily News, one of the city’s major circulation newspapers, covered a case of suicide in November 1998 it broke new ground.

A quarter page photograph showed the prone corpse of a 35 year old woman who had committed suicide. There was another photograph too, showing a barbecue grill, incongruously positioned in the tiny bathroom near where she died. The grill contained the lumps of charcoal that she had burned to raise the carbon monoxide in the air to a fatal level, easy to achieve in the small rooms characteristic of Hong Kong apartments.

This was one of the first known cases of suicide by charcoal burning in Hong Kong and the first time the method had been given such sensationalist media coverage. In the following weeks several more cases occurred. A …