Suicide, individual and context: Social representations of suicide in a Brazilian newspaper

Abstract

This study investigated the social representations of suicide in reports published by Folha de São Paulo newspaper, based on three thematic axes defined a priori: i) how suicide is portrayed, ii) how those who commit suicide are characterized, and iii) how practical everyday contexts are associated with suicide. As a data source, 103 reports published between 2015 and 2021 on Twitter by Folha de São Paulo newspaper were used, whose corpus of textual data was subjected to content analysis. The results demonstrated i) relations of opposition and complementarity concerning the suicide object; ii) descriptive, pejorative, and affirmative terms for those who commit suicide; and iii) social and individual contexts associated with the phenomenon. We discuss the anchoring processes, the function of naming the object as a mental disorder, the contextual dimension of social representations of suicide, and the objectification of those who commit suicide as people with disorders, problems, and victims. It is concluded that such representations maintain a duality in the construction of public discourse that, on the one hand, encourages the debate on suicide as a preventable public health problem and, on the other, makes use of resources that have the potential to increase the number of self-inflicted deaths to spread the news.