How to Spot a Psychopath

In this post on Ben Goldacre's excellent Bad Science (a site to which I have linked tediously frequently), Ben opines that reporting on a peculiar suicide in such a way that readers would learn enough to be able to duplicate it is "one of the most appalling and foul pieces of reporting I have ever seen".

The report he's talking about is here, about the suicide of one David Phyall. Do feel free to read it, and the Bad Science post, before reading the rest of this.

Goldacre bases his objection on the fact that widely-disseminated reporting on particular types of suicide has been proven to increase not only the popularity of that type of suicide, but the overall suicide rate. In other words, if a popular newspaper puts anybody who throws themselves in front of a train on the front page with a huge headline and a big full-colour picture of the remains, you can expect people who would not, otherwise, have killed themselves to do so, and even to favour trains as the means of their demise.

"Suicidality" is not like genetics, or height, or even religion. Some people are seriously suicidal for a length of time, but most people who intended to kill themselves but did not, are not still suicidal the next day. (Which is a bit of a bugger if they've chosen a suicide technique that takes a while to kill you, like paracetamol overdose.)

Given this, it clearly is irresponsible for the mass media to report on suicides in their usual "hey, wow, check this out dude" tone.

But.

Here's a thought experiment for you, Ben.

How bizarre would a suicide have to be to make it acceptable, in your opinion, for it to be reported in sufficient detail that readers could, had they the determination and resources (two things that suicidal people typically, of course, lack), duplicate it?

Crawling under a pile-driver at a building site and waiting for the working day to begin?

Hurling yourself into the acid tank at an industrial galvanising plant?

Setting up a W. Heath Robinson contraption of string, rolling balls, clockwork robots et cetera that culminates with a trigger being pulled?

(For other options, allow me to recommend the inimitable Bunny Suicides, which you'd better buy in a hurry before they get banned because they're encouraging people to get themselves stung to death by bees or crushed by collapsing masonry.)

Yes, the description of this bizarre suicide told you enough that you could do exactly the same thing yourself. But doing something just a bit similar could leave you just as dead - you've got your chainsaw, you've got your neck, figure it out - and I can think of no way in which the event could have been accurately reported that would not have provided details of the particular way Mr Phyall did it - unless you leave it so vague that a large proportion of readers will want to know what the heck you're on about.

Giving yourself a fatal injury with a chainsaw isn't terribly hard, but actually cutting your head right off (in this case actually only almost right off) is. No half-sober editor would approve a story that didn't give at least an outline of what actually happened in a strange case like this, since the fact that Phyall managed to pretty much sever his whole head is why the death's being given more than 20 words in the first place.

Apparently this story - or very similar versions of the same thing, published in other places - was the subject of several complaints to the UK Press Complaints Commission, which is the usual sort of toothless media watchdog, but never mind that now. The PCC upheld some of the complaints as contravening section 5ii of their Code of Practice ("When reporting suicide, care should be taken to avoid excessive detail about the method used."). But they didn't uphold the same complaint about all of the stories.

It would appear that the line was drawn between stories that mentioned Phyall taping the electric saw's trigger down and allowing gravity to pull the blade through his neck, and stories - like the one on this page - which did not.

It does not seem likely to me that someone attracted to the idea of a chainsaw suicide would be greatly impeded by not having those particular pieces of information. But perhaps that's why I've not been asked to adjudicate these sorts of disputes.

I think Ben is drawing the line in the same place as the PCC, because the tape and the positioning of the saw are really all you can subtract from the story while still leaving it in a comprehensible state. OK, you could also not mention the timer-switch, but that wasn't really integral to the act.

All of the versions of the David Phyall story are grotesque to a greater or lesser degree, but that's unimportant, for those of us who are able to learn about a terrible thing without suffering a grave injury to our innocence.

What's more important - immensely important, actually, even if it's routinely ignored by everybody who matters - is that these stories are clearly not in the public interest. Which, famously, is not at all the same thing as "what the public is interested in".

But that's not what Ben's complaining about. He called the Telegraph story "one of the most appalling and foul pieces of reporting I have ever seen", apparently because it included details which could have been figured out by a child charged with solving a (suitably Fisher-Price-ised) similar problem.

Bad Science has, in the past, complained about "journalism" which, if you ask me, really does constitute criminal negligence, at the least.

The bullshit MMR scare, for instance, and its bone-headed determination to make measles, mumps and rubella as deadly as they always used to be. Or, recently, an utterly backward story about prostate cancer screening, which is just another in Bad Science's very long list of miserably incorrect, and actively dangerous, failures of mainstream science journalism in general and medical-science journalism in particular. Or the stupid "balanced reporting" in which no statement is so ridiculous that it cannot be printed after "But critics allege...".

These stories don't encourage people to die in impressive, blood-all-over-the-train-platform ways. But they certainly do encourage people to use worthless "preventative" "nutritional" approaches, or dangerous treatments, or no treatment at all, for dangerous yet conventionally-treatable illnesses. Even if they only take a few weeks, on average, off the life of all of their readers (I include in this time spent doing unpleasant things that you think are therapeutic, but aren't), that adds up to a lot of whole lives down the drain.

And, heck, Ben's even tackled BS stories about suicide.

The funny thing is that all of the dreadful medical-science stories really do encourage people to do what the people in the story did, and they do so more strongly than stories about non-"bizarre" suicides. (I base this evaluation on the assumption that most people will find a "do this and you'll be healthy" story more persuasive than a "do this and you'll be dead" one.)

So I can only presume that Ben's "appalling and foul" archive includes all of the above, and ranks them higher than the story about the chainsaw suicide.

I contend that reports of bizarre suicides, as opposed to the usual solitary, miserable type that excites the prurient interest not at all, do not, in fact, have a significant effect on the overall suicide rate.

I'm also pretty sure they do not encourage people to start trying the same bizarre suicide technique. I base this on the fact that the same places that reported one bizarre suicide would be pretty likely to report copy-cats with larger and larger headlines - but I haven't noticed a sudden plague of reports about autodecapitations after the Telegraph report on the unfortunate Mr Phyall.

There actually were a couple of chainsaw-suicide reports earlier in 2008. This bloke killed himself in March - perhaps a proper big professional chainsaw makes it easier to lop your head off - but that brief report is one of those dodgy ones that sounds as if it was boiled down from a piece in some other, non-English-language newspaper, and in any case says the man had been suicidal for some time, and had just watched one or the other version of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. So I doubt he was following any real person's lead.

The Daily Fail Mail said this bloke sawed himself at almost the same time - so it's conceivable that he actually did see the previous report.

But I don't think it's likely.

It is uncontroversial that men prefer splashy, kinetic suicide techniques, which tend by their very nature to be more effective than the more passive techniques - wrist-slashing, pills - preferred by women. Lots of men have killed themselves with one or another kind of power tool (not always on purpose, of course).

And chainsaws are an iconic Dangerous Object. Nobody who doesn't work with them every day can avoid thinking about the sheer destructive power a chainsaw represents, in the real world and in the popular imagination, whenever they pick one up.

I mean, do a Google Images search for "chainsaw" (SafeSearch off...), and as of this writing eight of the 20 images on the first search-result page feature a saw wielded as a weapon, splattered with blood and/or converted into a purpose-built man-slicer.

Reporting of prosaic suicides seems entirely different to me. But it's still confusing.

Informing your audience that an inexpensive unvented charcoal heater in your sealed bedroom is an effective way for people who do not own a car to gas themselves is, I suppose, dangerous and irresponsible.

But what about reporting that people using combustion heaters should be very sure that the room is adequately ventilated, and mentioning that X many people were found dead last winter? That's a perfect example of public-interest reporting, right? Government agencies have pamphlets about it.

Ignoring that little confounder for now, a charcoal-heater carbon-monoxide suicide story does have all of the ingredients to encourage copy-cats. It's easy, it's cheap, and it's passive. As with the classic overdose, you just do something simple, then go to sleep, and you don't wake up. Even if you don't really and truly want to die all that much, passive techniques like this feel like offloading the responsibility onto the universe. It ain't like overcoming the strong instinctive desire to not jump off a tall building.

A person so miserable that they can hardly get out of bed can still take an overdose, or light a heater.

David Phyall, in contrast, set up a simple but ingenious timer contraption to kill himself. I don't know what was going on in his head, but if it was hard-core black-dog clinical depression, he must have been some sort of superman to be able to rig up that saw contraption.

(Just to put another twist in the story, Phyall also apparently did it as an act of protest. Not a very rational act of protest, I grant you - the various reports say he just didn't want to move out of his flat, in a building which was going to be demolished - but a protest nonetheless. Nobody's very likely to kill themselves out of solidarity with Phyall, but if a paper prints a story about a spectacular suicide to protest some real socio-political issue, and more people then kill themselves in the same way to protest the same thing, I don't think it's entirely reasonable to ascribe this entirely to the media coverage.)

If Ben's argument were that the media should abandon their love for cheap sensationalism and report on things that actually matter to people beyond the family and friends of the latest person to die strangely (among the dozens, if not hundreds, who died the same day from non-newsworthy but preventable causes), then I would agree with it. I'd still think that any report that actually told the audience about a real, if prurient, thing that happened would be preferable to the ones that're just trumpeting nonsense from some press release, but that's like enjoying eating grass more than you enjoy eating sand. You'd still prefer food.

The mainstream media really are in a terrible state. It's simply impossible for the remaining staff at the world's newspapers and TV stations to do proper journalism, most of the time. Some of them are plainly incompetent and/or lazy, but lots have their act together and work as hard as anybody ought to have to. There's just too much space to fill, and too little time to fill it. So journalists are reduced to dubbing their own voice over PR-firm Video News Releases, printing press releases as news, and stuffing every stupid gory headline-grabber they can find into their papers, while wars and famines trundle along in the background, out of sight.

This is hardly a new phenomenon, of course, but everybody's doing "tabloid journalism" now, to a greater or lesser extent.

Against this backdrop, I think an accurate account of one poor fellow's unusual demise does not qualify as significantly more "appalling and foul" than any 20 other articles in any modern newspaper you care to name.

At the beginning of Ben's post, he has a preface, not present in the newspaper-published version of the article, which apologetically says that it it his "first unambiguous abuse of my position as a 'columnist'". He says that he's so upset about this because of hideous and unnecessary prurient media interest in the death of someone - not the chainsaw guy - that he knew. He then opines that the media's irresponsible reporting on coroners' inquests means that they should no longer be allowed to do so - that, in other words, the court should be closed and secret.

This is exactly wrong, and Ben well knows it. He has previously made it perfectly clear that he knows that the solution to bad reporting is not no reporting, but more reporting. Ben regularly makes fun of people who insist that they've got data to support their strange assertions, but it's a secret; making secret everything that happens in a court is far worse than that.

The Curse of the Regular Columnist is that you have to come up with something by deadline (or somewhere in the deadline's rough vicinity). This means you may find yourself letting unfinished thoughts out the door, or digging up something that's been in the "not good enough" folder for months. Ben's says he's been stewing over the chainsaw-suicide story for a while; I hope it only made it to print because he'd been staring at that deadly blank word-processor screen for a while, and really couldn't think of anything else to write.

So I think Ben's right: This is an "unambiguous abuse" of his position, and he has unfairly slurred the author of the "appalling and foul" article, with its appalling mention of sticky tape and its foul inclusion of information about the little-known force of gravity.

I can't think of another thing Ben's written with which I do not wholeheartedly agree, but this time he's screwed up.

Next column would be a good time for the apology, I think.