Judicial Deaths and Suicide Reporting: What Media Must Do Better
TL;DR
A 30-year-old Delhi judge was found dead at his Safdarjung residence on May 2, 2026, and within hours media headlines had turned a family's grief into a spectacle of speculation. India has clear guidelines on responsible suicide reporting from the WHO, the Press Council, and the Indian Psychiatric Society. Almost none of them are consistently followed. This matters because irresponsible reporting kills people.
A Judge Dies. The Circus Begins.
On Saturday afternoon, May 2, 2026, the body of Aman Kumar Sharma was found hanging in his bathroom at his government accommodation in Delhi's Safdarjung area. Sharma, a 30-year-old Judicial Magistrate First Class who had served in Delhi's courts since 2021, had reportedly made a distress call to his father the night before. "It's become difficult to live," he told his father, complaining of being "harassed for two months."
He left behind a note saying no one was responsible for his death.
What happened next was predictable. Within hours, headlines were dissecting his marriage, naming his wife and her sister (an IAS officer), reproducing alleged details from his distress call, and framing the entire tragedy as a domestic dispute. Outlets speculated about a fight with his wife and her family's "control" over the household. The police themselves acknowledged that "no foul play has been established" and that all angles were being examined.
None of that caution made it into the headlines.
The Rules Nobody Follows
India is not short on guidelines for reporting suicide. It has, in fact, layers of them. The problem is that almost nobody follows them, and there is practically no enforcement.
What the Press Council Says
The Press Council of India (PCI) guidelines, developed in reference to the Mental Healthcare Act 2017 and WHO recommendations, are straightforward:
- Do not place suicide stories prominently or repeat them excessively
- Do not use language that sensationalises or normalises suicide
- Do not present suicide as a constructive solution to problems
- Do not publish photographs, video footage, or details of the method
What the Indian Psychiatric Society Recommends
The Indian Psychiatric Society's guidelines, published in 2014, go further. They recommend not publishing suicide notes, using the opportunity to educate the public about mental health, and de-stigmatising conversations about suicidal thoughts. They explicitly recommend against naming the method of death and suggest including helpline numbers in every report.
What the WHO Says
The WHO's resource for media professionals, updated in 2023 (its fourth edition), lays out specific "do's" and "don'ts":
| Do | Don't |
|---|---|
| Use "died by suicide" or "took their own life" | Use "committed suicide" (implies crime) |
| Provide helpline numbers prominently | Publish photos of the scene or method |
| Report on how people overcome crises | Place the story on the front page |
| Educate about warning signs | Describe the method in detail |
The guidelines exist. They are publicly available. They are backed by decades of research. And in case after case, they are ignored.
Why Does This Matter? The Numbers Are Clear.
This is not an abstract ethics debate. Irresponsible suicide reporting directly causes more deaths. The evidence base is unusually strong for a social science finding.
The Werther Effect
In 1974, American sociologist David Phillips documented what became known as the "Werther effect": after major newspaper coverage of suicides, suicide rates rose significantly. Subsequent research found that celebrity suicides covered prominently in media led to an 8-18% rise in suicide rates in the following two months. When the method was described in detail, suicides using that specific method rose by 30%.
This is not theory. It is replicated across countries and decades.
The Papageno Effect
The flipside is equally well-documented. When media stories focus on people who overcame suicidal crises, on coping strategies, on recovery, suicide rates actually decline. Researchers call this the "Papageno effect", named after the character in Mozart's opera who is talked out of taking his own life. Multiple randomised controlled trials have confirmed that stories of hope and recovery reduce suicidal ideation among vulnerable readers.
The media has the power to save lives. It just keeps choosing not to.
The Sushant Singh Rajput Lesson India Forgot
India already experienced this at scale. When actor Sushant Singh Rajput died by suicide in June 2020, the media coverage was a textbook case of everything the guidelines warn against. Channels broadcast images of the scene. They named his method. They named his psychiatrist and leaked confidential medical details. They turned his girlfriend into a murder suspect without evidence.
A Google search study by SNEHA, a suicide prevention organisation, found a 28% spike in searches for "how to die by suicide" in the two weeks following the coverage. At least two people, including a 13-year-old girl, died using the same method in the days after.
The Bombay High Court eventually issued directions to the media, with the Chief Justice noting that "everybody went berserk, presuming it is a murder." The Press Council reiterated its guidelines. And then everyone moved on.
Six years later, with Aman Kumar Sharma's death, the same patterns repeat.
How Regional Media Makes It Worse
The compliance problem gets sharper when you look beyond English-language outlets. A study of suicide reporting in Kerala, a state with one of India's highest suicide rates, found that local-language newspapers were significantly less compliant with WHO guidelines than their English counterparts. Method descriptions, prominent placement, and sensationalised language were far more common in Malayalam-language coverage.
This matters because regional media reaches the most vulnerable populations. The daily wage earner in a Tier 3 town, the farmer in debt, the student under exam pressure, these readers are not consuming English broadsheets. They are reading the local paper or watching the regional news channel. And that is exactly where the guidelines are least followed.
The SPIRIT media guidelines, developed specifically for Indian media, tried to bridge this gap with practical, context-specific recommendations. But awareness remains low. A study found that 70% of suicide attempters were unaware of Section 309 IPC, and not a single respondent knew about Section 115 of the Mental Healthcare Act. If the people most affected by these laws do not know they exist, expecting their local journalists to follow reporting guidelines built on the same legal framework is optimistic at best.
The solution is not more guidelines. India has enough. The solution is enforcement, training, and making compliance a condition rather than a suggestion.
The Special Problem With "Important" People
When a judge, politician, or celebrity dies by suicide, reporting gets worse, not better. The "importance" of the person gives editors permission to treat the death as a news event rather than a public health matter.
With Aman Kumar Sharma, the coverage zeroed in on his wife's family background. Her sister is an IAS officer. That detail, irrelevant to the actual tragedy, became the centrepiece of the narrative. Headlines asked whether a "fight with wife" was behind the death. Family members' allegations were published without context or verification.
The man left a note saying nobody was responsible. That detail appeared in paragraph five or six of most reports, well below the speculative headline.
The Judiciary's Silent Crisis
What almost no outlet explored was the structural context. India's judiciary is stretched beyond breaking point. Judges handle caseloads that are incomparable to their counterparts in other countries. Lower judiciary officers, especially in the JMFC cadre where Sharma served, work in what has been described as "a system that can only be compared to a military hierarchy."
There are no structured mental health support systems within the judiciary. The stigma around mental illness among legal professionals remains significant. When former Chief Justice DY Chandrachud acknowledged this publicly, calling stigma the primary barrier to judges seeking help, it was treated as a remarkable admission rather than the start of a policy conversation.
The Bombay High Court's Sukoon counselling centre, a collaboration with TISS, remains one of the few concrete initiatives. It is a pilot project in one High Court. The subordinate judiciary, where the pressure is greatest, has nothing comparable.
Sharma's death was an opportunity to report on all of this. Instead, the media wrote a domestic drama.
India's Suicide Numbers Should Alarm Everyone
India recorded 171,418 suicides in 2023, according to the latest NCRB data. That is roughly 470 people every single day. The suicide rate has risen consistently from 9.9 per lakh in 2017 to 12.4 per lakh in 2022, bucking the global trend where rates in many countries have stabilised or declined.
| Year | Total Suicides | Rate per Lakh |
|---|---|---|
| 2017 | ~1,30,000 | 9.9 |
| 2020 | ~1,53,052 | 11.3 |
| 2022 | 1,70,924 | 12.4 |
| 2023 | 1,71,418 | ~12.5 |
Source: NCRB data compiled by CMHLP
Family-related problems and illness (physical and mental) account for over half of all suicides. Daily wage earners are the single largest affected group at 28%. Student suicides have reached record highs. And these are official numbers, which researchers believe undercount deaths by 25-50%, particularly among women.
Every one of these deaths is a potential news story. And every news story has the potential to either prevent or trigger the next one.
The Law Changed. The Coverage Didn't.
India made a significant legal shift in 2017. Section 115 of the Mental Healthcare Act effectively decriminalised suicide attempts by creating a presumption that anyone who attempts suicide is suffering from severe mental stress and should receive care, not punishment. This overrode the colonial-era Section 309 of the IPC, which had made attempting suicide a criminal offence punishable by up to a year in prison.
The Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, which replaced the IPC in 2024, dropped the equivalent provision entirely. Legally, India has moved from punishing suicide to treating it as a mental health crisis.
But media language has not caught up. Reports still routinely say someone "committed" suicide, language the WHO explicitly flags as implying a crime. Outlets still describe methods in detail. They still publish suicide notes. They still place these stories on the front page with dramatic headlines.
A 2020 study analysing Indian newspaper compliance found that harmful reporting practices appeared in 43.3% of suicide stories, while helpful practices appeared in just 2.5%. A 2026 systematic review of global media compliance with WHO guidelines found non-compliance rates ranging from 10% to over 80% across countries, with compliance with recommended "do's" at just 2-25%.
India is not an outlier. But it is a country where 470 people die by suicide every day. The stakes for getting this right are higher than almost anywhere else.
What Responsible Reporting Actually Looks Like
It is worth noting that good examples exist. When Sushant Singh Rajput died, The Hindu carried the story on its back page in the Life/Sport section, included helpline numbers prominently, and used "died by suicide" throughout. It was possible. One outlet just chose to do it.
Here is what every newsroom could do tomorrow without spending a rupee:
1. Kill the method details. There is no public interest in knowing how someone died by suicide. There is significant public harm. The research is unambiguous.
2. Stop reproducing suicide notes. The PCI and IPS both recommend against it. The families rarely consent. And a suicide note published in a national newspaper reaches millions of vulnerable readers.
3. Move the story off the front page. A death by suicide is not "breaking news." It is a tragedy that deserves careful, considered reporting. The placement itself signals to editors and readers how much spectacle they should expect.
4. Include helpline numbers in every story. Not buried at the bottom in eight-point font. Prominently. Every time.
5. Shift the narrative. For every story about a death, there could be a story about someone who survived a crisis, accessed help, and recovered. The Papageno effect is real. Use it.
6. Stop naming family members as suspects. When a person dies by suicide, the people around them are grieving. Turning them into characters in a media-constructed "investigation" is not journalism. It is entertainment at the expense of people in their worst moments.
What Readers Can Do
You are not powerless in this. Every click on a sensationalised headline teaches an algorithm that this is what audiences want. Every share amplifies the harm.
Here is what you can do:
- Don't share stories that describe methods or reproduce notes. If a headline reveals how someone died, the outlet has already failed the guidelines. Don't reward them with traffic.
- Call out bad reporting. The PCI accepts complaints. So does the News Broadcasting & Digital Standards Authority. File them.
- Seek out coverage that includes helplines and expert voices. Share that instead.
- Check in on people. If someone you know is in the judiciary, law enforcement, medicine, or any high-pressure profession, a conversation is worth more than a hundred opinion pieces about mental health.
Why Editors Keep Getting It Wrong
It is tempting to blame individual journalists, but the incentive structure is the real problem. Digital media runs on engagement metrics. A headline that says "Judge Dies by Suicide, Family Alleges Domestic Harassment" will outperform "Delhi Judicial Officer Found Dead; Investigation Ongoing" every time. Editors know this. They make a calculation, sometimes consciously, sometimes not, that the public interest in "the story" outweighs the abstract risk of contagion.
That calculation is wrong, but it is rational within the system as it exists. There is no penalty for violating reporting guidelines. The PCI can issue advisories, but it cannot fine outlets or revoke credentials. The NBDSA handles complaints but takes months to adjudicate them, by which time the damage is done. The Bombay High Court's directions after the Sushant case were legally binding only on the parties before it.
Compare this with Australia, where media regulators can impose financial penalties for guideline violations in suicide reporting. Or with Austria, where a targeted media campaign after a subway system saw a cluster of suicides led to a measurable decline in copycat deaths after newsrooms adopted responsible reporting standards. Enforcement works. India has just never seriously tried it.
The Conversation We Keep Avoiding
Aman Kumar Sharma's death could have opened a real conversation about mental health in the Indian judiciary, about the lack of support systems for young judicial officers, about what it means to work in a hierarchical system with caseloads that would be considered unconscionable anywhere else in the world.
Instead, the media delivered exactly what it delivered after Sushant Singh Rajput, and after every public figure's death before that: speculation, naming, method descriptions, and a rush to frame a narrative before the facts were in.
India's newsrooms are not ignorant of the guidelines. They simply face no consequences for ignoring them. Until that changes, until compliance is enforced rather than suggested, until editors face real costs for irresponsible reporting, the pattern will continue.
The guidelines exist. The research is clear. The law has evolved. What has not evolved is the news industry's willingness to follow its own rules when clicks are on the line.
Every irresponsible headline is a gamble with someone's life. The numbers say some of those gambles are lost.
If you or someone you know is struggling with suicidal thoughts, please reach out: - iCall: 9152987821 - Vandrevala Foundation: 1860-2662-345 - AASRA: 9820466726 - National Suicide Prevention Helpline: 1800-121-3820
Sources
- ThePrint: Delhi judicial officer dies by suicide; family cries foul
- The Federal: Delhi judge made distress call to father before suicide
- Deccan Herald: Delhi judicial officer dies by suicide; foul play not ruled out
- PMC: Media Matters in Suicide - Indian Guidelines on Suicide Reporting
- Indian Journal of Psychiatry: National Guidelines for Media Reporting of Suicide
- WHO: Preventing Suicide - A Resource for Media Professionals (2023)
- PMC: The Werther Effect, the Papageno Effect or No Effect? A Literature Review
- British Journal of Psychiatry: Role of Media Reports in Completed and Prevented Suicide
- The Lancet Public Health: Effects of Media Stories of Hope on Suicidal Ideation
- Newslaundry: How Sushant Singh Rajput's Suicide Was Turned Into a Spectacle
- The Wire Science: Indian Media Is Irresponsible When Reporting on Suicides
- CMHLP: NCRB Data on Suicide for 2023 - Key Takeaways
- PMC: NCRB Suicide in India 2022 Report - Key Trends
- PMC: Decriminalization of Suicide per Section 115 of MHCA 2017
- LiveLaw: Mental Health of Lawyers & Judges - Need to Shed Stigma
- ScienceDirect: Global Media Compliance with WHO Suicide Reporting Guidelines (2026)
