When famous comedian Ni Min-jan (倪敏然) ended his life in April this year, the soap opera began. News crews raced to the Ilan County mountainside where his body was found to film the tree from which he had hung himself. They dug up photos of him leaving the Toucheng (頭城) train station -- the last time he was captured on film. They tailed his wife and children, hounding them with questions.
They tailed the Chinese actress Xia Yi (夏禕), with whom he was reported to have had an affair. Anyone with any connection to Ni was considered fair game. His suicide stayed in the news until a different suicide -- of a couple who met over the Internet and made a pact to end their lives -- took its place.
Taiwan's high suicide rate is one of its most pressing social issues. It's also one of its most highly publicized. But some say the nature of local media coverage may actually exacerbate the problem rather than helping alleviate it.
"The bigger problem is that suicide as a social phenomenon deserves media attention because it's a huge public health issue," said Wang Shih-fan (
The balancing act, Wang said, is how the media can cover suicide without sensationalizing it? There seems to be "very little coverage on suicide as a public health issue."
Suicide has been one of the top-10 causes of death in Taiwan for the past nine years. Over the past 10 years, the nation's suicide rate has increased from seven out of every 10,000 persons to 15.3 out of every 10,000 persons. While once the largest age bracket was those between 45 and 64, it's now those between 25 and 44. For people between ages 15 and 24, suicide is the second leading cause of death.
Last year, a reported 3,468 people took their own life, or one every two-and-a-half hours. Authorities point out, however, that suicide rates are thought to be underestimated by 20 percent to 25 percent among the elderly and 6 percent to 12 percent among other age groups, with many likely suicides wrongly reported as accidents or where the cause of death was listed as "unknown."
Medical professionals worry that suicide is becoming more ritualized, a phenomenon they attribute to the sensationalized coverage of suicide in the media. In 1998, when a woman in Hong Kong killed herself by sealing her apartment with tape and burning charcoal until she died of asphyxiation, it became one of the top-three methods used by those attempting to kill themselves.
Several Internet sites dedicated to suicide methods have sprung up. Many even have bulletin boards where those
wanting to end their lives can find like-minded people. More
upsettingly, so-called family suicides have become
increasingly common. Either to take revenge against a spouse, or out of the belief that it would be cruel to orphan their children, some suicidal parents first murder their children before taking their own life. There have been 78 such cases in Taiwan in the past decade, according to a recent study conducted by researchers at National Taiwan University. Half of those cases have occurred in the past three years alone.
Wang was among several academics and civil groups who, in August, proposed a set of guidelines for news coverage of suicide which they hoped local media outlets would follow. The guidelines they proposed follow closely the guidelines promoted by the World Health Organization on responsible coverage of suicides in the news (see factbox).
Calls to several medial outlets inquiring about their guidelines for covering suicides went unanswered. But one person, a cameraman for a satellite news gathering unit who asked to remain anonymous, said that guidelines, if they exist, aren't put into practice. Instead, he and other cameramen are
pressured to get the most "interesting" images.
"It's deemed `newsworthy' if there was something about [the suicide] that was unusual," the cameraman said. "If it was an old man who took sleeping pills we don't go. If it was an Internet suicide or a family suicide or especially a celebrity, we're told to go. We're not told what specific images to get, but there's a tacit understanding that we should try to get images that other stations won't have."
But academics and media watch groups say even aspects of suicide coverage that might not be considered bad taste have been shown to adversely affect suicide rates in the immediate aftermath of the coverage.
Research shows that heavy reporting of a celebrity suicide can increase suicide rates by as much as 14 percent. After celebrity Leslie Cheung (
Conversely, a study in Vienna showed that, after media there launched a self-restraint campaign and stopped showing graphic and sensational descriptions of suicide, after six months the city's suicide rate dropped by 8 percent.
"What's upsetting is that suicide is a largely preventable problem," said Lyu Shu-yu (
While global attention is finally being focused on the People’s Republic of China (PRC) gray zone aggression against Philippine territory in the South China Sea, at the other end of the PRC’s infamous 9 dash line map, PRC vessels are conducting an identical campaign against Indonesia, most importantly in the Natuna Islands. The Natunas fall into a gray area: do the dashes at the end of the PRC “cow’s tongue” map include the islands? It’s not clear. Less well known is that they also fall into another gray area. Indonesia’s Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ) claim and continental shelf claim are not
Since their leader Ko Wen-je (柯文哲) and others were jailed as part of several ongoing bribery investigations, the Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) has risen in the polls. Additionally, despite all the many and varied allegations against Ko and most of the top people in the party, it has held together with only a tiny number of minor figures exiting. The TPP has taken some damage, but vastly less than the New Power Party (NPP) did after it was caught up in a bribery scandal in 2020. The TPP has for years registered favorability in the thirties, and a Formosa poll
Nov. 4 to Nov. 10 Apollo magazine (文星) vowed that it wouldn’t play by the rules in its first issue — a bold statement to make in 1957, when anyone could be jailed for saying the wrong thing. However, the introduction to the inaugural Nov. 5 issue also defined the magazine as a “lifestyle, literature and art” publication, and the contents were relatively tame for the first four years, writes Tao Heng-sheng (陶恒生) in “The Apollo magazine that wouldn’t play by the rules” (不按牌理出牌的文星雜誌). In 1961, the magazine changed its mission to “thought, lifestyle and art” and adopted a more critical tone with
Chiayi County is blessed with several worthwhile upland trails, not all of which I’ve hiked. A few weeks ago, I finally got around to tackling Tanghu Historic Trail (塘湖古道), a short but unusually steep route in Jhuci Township (竹崎). According to the Web site of the Alishan National Scenic Area (阿里山國家風景區), the path climbs from 308m above sea level to an elevation of 770m in just 1.58km, an average gradient of 29 percent. And unless you arrange for someone to bring you to the starting point and collect you at the other end, there’s no way to avoid a significant amount
RSS