In a six-year period in San Diego County, 2,000 people took their own lives, making suicide first among causes of non-natural death, followed by motor vehicle crashes, drug overdoses and homicides.
In fact, according to a report by a committee of the Community Health Improvement Project, from 1996 to 2001, the 2,000 suicides outnumbered the 807 homicides nearly 2.5 to 1. Among people 15 to 24 in that same six-year period, suicide was the third leading cause of non-natural death.
Also, a 2001 study of risky teen behavior by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, showed that among San Diego city schools students surveyed, 10.5 percent reported attempting suicide at least once during the previous year. That was up from 6.3 percent in the 1991 survey. The national average for 2001 was 8.8 percent.
That’s why Beth Sise, an attorney and nurse practitioner who heads the health project’s suicide prevention committee, was disappointed with the lack of information she considers essential in a Jan. 26 story about a 17-
year-old East County girl who attempted to commit suicide by stepping in front of a trolley. The story focused on her recovery efforts after 42 doctors at Sharp Memorial Hospital saved her life. She needed 12 surgeries, one of them to amputate her legs.
Sise was disturbed by the tone of the headline that she said set the story in a “all too heroic light.” The headline said: “A life regained after suicide try.” A secondary headline said: “Teen-ager dreams of dancing again.” Sise fears the story with the large, color “attractive” photograph of the girl “may encourage imitation in potential victims who might view suicide as a way to get attention.”
She also faulted the story because she said it oversimplified the cause of the suicide attempt, because it did not include a list of suicide risk factors and warning signs, and because it lacked information from a mental health professional or expert in suicide prevention who would have provided details about available resources.
But she also had praise for the story. She said it did an excellent job of describing the ripple effect in how the suicide attempt affected the girl’s family and friends. The story also included hotline telephone numbers to call for help and national statistics.
I suspect one problem was that the reporter and editor didn’t see it as a story about suicide but as one of survival and courage. And it was. However, when a story receives the emphasis it did and hinges on a suicide attempt, the responsibility to educate is heightened.
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Out of the more than 500 stories that mentioned the Super Bowl last month, my favorite was the front-page article Jan. 25 headlined “Roman numbers just II much?”
As one editor put it, it was a stitch. That was the story that pointed out “The Wall Street Journal, dead kings, world wars and Super Bowls all have a certain thing in common.” They use Roman numerals.
What was fun about the story was the ancient system was used throughout the article, replacing the Hindu-Arabic numbers we are more accustomed to seeing. With the article, that was the brainchild of assistant metro editor John Cannon and written by reporter Michael Stetz, was a graphic that translated for those of us who have forgotten the lessons we learned in grade school: I=1; V=5; X=10; L=50; C=100; D=500, M=1,000.
As the one who does corrections for this newspaper, I held my breath that there were no mistakes. I didn’t spot any, but then I’m not renowned for my math ability. Most journalists aren’t.
Last Monday, there was an e-mail waiting from Rob Moberly who, it turns out, is a math major at San Diego State. He figured any third grader should have caught the mistake.
The error was in the seventh paragraph of the story and in reference to tickets, said: “And scalpers could get $MMMMM for a ticket on the 50-yard-line.”
Moberly pointed out that MMMMM is not how 5,000 is written in Roman numerals. The correct way is a V with a line above it. The line, he explained, indicates the number has been multipled by 1,000. It works that way for other Roman numerals as well. The more I thought about his explanation, the more I had a vague memory of learning this in grade school LLL years ago.
But what to do for a correction? It turns out the typesetting system this newspaper uses cannot set a line over the V or any other letter. It could be done in a graphic, of course, but corrections are not graphics. So, ergo, this explanation.
As Cannon, the editor, said: “Even if we could do it, I would not have known to use it until the reader wrote us about it. But I’ll never forget it, even if I live another CLXXI years.”
