News reporting of suicidal behaviour in Nigeria: Adherence assessment to World Health Organization guidelines

Background: Sensible media reporting has been considered an important suicide prevention strategy which is an under-researched issue in Nigeria. There is a dearth of research assessing how the media has been reporting suicidal news to the general population in Nigeria. Aim: It was aimed to see the adherence of news reports to the World Health Organization (WHO) suicide reporting guidelines while reporting the events. Methods: We searched the published contents of 10 English newspapers of Nigeria and assessed the adherence to the WHO media guidelines for reporting suicide from January 2010 to December 2019. Results: Most of the reports (85.31%) mentioned completed suicides, 4.4% recorded suicides, and 9.5% recorded suicide-related homicides. The majority of the reports mentioned the name (85.6%) and profession (63.8%) of the person; the name of the method (92%) and life events (67.8%). The word ‘suicide’ was mentioned in the headline of 87.6% of the reports; the method was mentioned in the headline of 22.8% of the reports, and 31.7% of the reports referred to life events in the headline. Only 8.8% of reports had traced mental illness, 33.3% traced the warning signs, 2.8% mentioned evidence of substance abuse and very few reports mentioned educative materials. Conclusion: The study found that Nigeria’s online newspapers are poorly adherent to the WHO media reporting guidelines. Explicit descriptions of the person, methods, life events, and mono-causal explanations were frequently published. Negligible initiatives have been found to educate the general people in the reports.