Another suicide attempt by a 16-year-old student. No — I am not going to write another word about the incident itself. Every journalist knows that the Code of Professional Ethics, which sets out our rights and responsibilities, covers suicide explicitly. It states, word for word, that “reporting on suicides and suicide attempts is as a rule avoided. In the exceptional cases where publication is justified, media outlets and journalists must demonstrate sensitivity and particular care.”
I will note, however, that according to a recent World Health Organisation report (WHO 2025), suicide remains one of the leading causes of death among young people aged 15 to 29 worldwide. It is the second leading cause of death among 15-to-19-year-olds in the United States, and among 15-to-24-year-olds across Europe.
It is also worth recalling that a working group at the Ministry of Education once produced a report on the relationship between media coverage and suicide, and wrote to the Attorney General to flag its findings. The report noted, among other things, that “contemporary scientific literature has examined the hypothesis that suicidal behaviour modelled in media coverage contributes to a rise in suicides — a phenomenon described as the ‘Werther effect’, after Goethe’s novel The Sorrows of Young Werther, whose protagonist takes his own life. The book was banned in several European cities after it was held responsible for the wave of suicides that followed its publication.” (Editor’s note: The German author was just 25 when the novel appeared in 1774. It was an immediate sensation across Germany and Europe, and made him internationally famous almost overnight.)
The report further found that “research data has established not only that media coverage of suicides contributes to an increase in their number, but that this increase correlates with the number of days the reporting continues. The media have also been implicated as a vehicle for the indirect transmission of suicidal behaviour in cases where a cluster or ‘epidemic’ of suicides is observed — a phenomenon documented internationally in schools, prisons and psychiatric hospitals.”
So where does that leave us? Should the journalist write, or stay silent? Should we report, or hold back — knowing that the evidence suggests silence might save lives? This is the timeless moral dilemma that young, romantic Werther — victim of a hopeless, unrequited love — carries across the centuries to us: a ghost from 18th-century Germany, still whispering an impossible question into the ear of every journalist in 21st-century Cyprus.
