Male youth suicide in the UK and its emergence as a social problemin Dissertation

Male youth suicide in the UK and its emergence as a social problemin the 1990s in related to press - Dissertation Example The effects of the portrayal of male suicide in the prominent UK publications, The Times and The Guardian, will be presented, detailing how media coverage of this subject has affected the suicide rates of male youth in order to set up the research question that will be examined in more detail in the M2 project. I have chosen The Times and The Guardian as the two referential publications for my research because they are both quality publications that have already gone through the process of tabloidization and currently can be relied on to provide accurate, quality information. The public believes they treat current affairs fairly seriously, so, they are important in forming views and peoples opinions. 2 Suicide Defined Establishing a comprehensive definition for what qualifies as ‘suicide’ is quite difficult, since the most common definitions of the word and the technical definition used by the Coroner’s office in England and Wales diverge. The most common definiti ons of ‘suicide’ are expressed in the following context: a. â€Å"The act of deliberately taking one's own life† (Frankish and Jeffereys). b. ... officially published suicide figures are collected from coronial investigations that take place in cases of unexpected or sudden deaths, and involve post-mortem reports, psychiatric records of the victim, and the social history as denoted by the friends and family, and suicide letters, if any (Sainsbury & Jenkins, 1982). A coronial verdict leaves a large scope for various probability factors, like suicidal behavioural tendencies noticed previously, records of psychiatric problems, associated social events that may have lead the victim to commit suicide, or a suicide note. There are also certain amounts of variations in the certification procedures, as the suicide certification in the UK is based on the coroners’ verdicts that are founded on public inquests; while in Germany, suicide cases are certified only by the general practitioners (Cantor, 2000). Often the problems in delineating suicides like drug overdoses, motor crashes where there was only one passenger (Phillips, 197 7), or death by drowning (O’Donnell & Farmer, 1995), makes it difficult for the investigators to arrive at a conclusion (Cantor, 2000). These aforementioned types of deaths are very often termed as accidental (see Figure 2), and owing to lack of any strong evidences, like a suicide letter, the deaths cannot be termed as presumably suicide (however there are differences based on the coroners’ choice). Thus, we find that, due to lack of evidences, suicides may be registered as ‘accidental’ deaths from unknown causes, unlike deaths by hanging, strangulation, or suffocation that are seen as conclusive evidence of suicide (see Figure 1). Figure 1: Deaths from ‘Suicides’ and ‘Undetermined Injury’ in England in 2008 (Gunnell, 6). Here the variations in the processes adopted for suicide