481 - How We Talk About Suicide Matters: A Free Course for Journalists
Public Health On Call
The Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health
4.6 • 644 Ratings
🗓️ 15 June 2022
⏱️ 14 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Suicide is a significant public health problem. News coverage, and how we talk about it with each other, can actually help prevent suicide and connect those who are vulnerable with lifesaving resources. Journalist and MPH suicide expert Aneri Pattani talks with Stephanie Desmon about a free Coursera course she helped develop, Responsible Reporting on Suicide for Journalists, and what we can all learn to help reframe the conversation around hope and resilience. Learn more about the course here.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to Public Health On Call, a podcast from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. |
| 0:12.0 | I'm Joshua Sharfstein, Vice Dean for Public Health Practice and Community Engagement, |
| 0:16.9 | and a former health commissioner here in Baltimore. |
| 0:19.7 | Our goal is to bring evidence and experience |
| 0:22.1 | to illuminate critical public health issues. If you have questions or ideas for us, please |
| 0:27.5 | send an email to public health question at jhhhu.edu. That's public health question at jhhu.edu for |
| 0:35.0 | future podcast episodes. |
| 0:40.7 | Hi, I'm Lindsay Smith-Rogers, producer of Public Health on Call. |
| 0:47.1 | Today, Stephanie Desmond talks to Anari Pitani, a full-time journalist and part-time MPHHs student at the Bloomberg School of Public Health. |
| 0:49.4 | She has created a free online course to help journalists and all of us really be more responsible with |
| 0:56.0 | how we communicate about suicide. Let's listen. I'm Mary Patani. Thanks so much for joining me. |
| 1:02.5 | Thanks for having me. So I'd like to talk today about a course that you've created on Coursera |
| 1:08.8 | called Responsible Reporting on Suicide for Journalists. |
| 1:13.8 | So first of all, I'd like to know sort of where this idea came from. |
| 1:17.8 | Yeah. So I am in my full-time role, a journalist, writing about issues like mental health, like |
| 1:24.2 | suicide. And I went to undergraduate school for journalism as well. But when I |
| 1:30.3 | got into the field and started covering these issues, particularly suicide, I didn't really have any |
| 1:36.4 | training on it. This was not a topic we talked about in school. It was not something anyone talked to me |
| 1:41.0 | about in the newsroom before I started writing on it. And once I |
| 1:44.3 | started writing articles, I got feedback from, you know, suicide prevention researchers, people |
| 1:50.5 | with lived experiences, who had lost loved ones to suicide. Like, hey, you know, there are actually |
| 1:56.1 | guidelines about how you should be covering this topic. You haven't followed them. And it was sort of a wake-up call, |
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