A Senior Lecturer at the Department of Psychology and President of the Association For Suicide Prevention Ghana, Prof. Emmanuel Nii-Boye Quarshie has called on all media practitioners to adopt the World Health Organization’s guidelines for responsible suicide reporting in order to combat the increasing rate of suicide cases globally.
Speaking at WHO’s “LIVE LIFE for Suicide Prevention in Ghana: Responsible Media Reporting of Suicide Project” on January 14,2025, he explained that media houses also have a significant role to play when it preventing suicides. He emphasized that the reporting on suicide cases require special techniques and media houses must learn to adapt to those techniques.
“Suicide cannot be reported like an ordinary health issue or news related to death. They are setting, if you like, guidelines that might be followed. They are setting recommendations that might be observed in how the news is presented.That way, we will end up preventing suicide. We will end up promoting resilience and encouraging people to seek help. I mean people who may be going through suicidal crisis and emotional breakdown and so on,” Prof. Quarshie stated.
He also called on government to build the necessary infrastructure needed in the fight against suicide. He explained that the lack of basic infrastructure such as data collection systems makes it difficult in coming up with long lasting solutions needed in the fight against suicide.
“ And government has a lot to do. For example, as we speak, we don’t have any official, reliable data on suicide. We don’t.And so certainly we have to start with data collection and structuring because we need data to inform us in terms of which area to move if we want to do some intervention, if we want to build some preventive strategies and so on.”
The WHO’s LIVE LIFE for Suicide Prevention in Ghana Responsible Media Reporting of Suicide Project is a One-day Capacity Building Workshop held annually on the application of the Ghana Guidelines for Media Reporting of Suicide by the Association of Suicide Prevention Ghana.
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Story by Kwadwo Owusu Anane| univers.ug.edu.gh
Edited by Deborah Owusu
