On September 22, 2014, the Institute of Medicine’s Roundtable on Population Health Improvement held a workshop to discuss some of the science of health communication, audiences, and messaging, and to explore what it will take to generate widespread awareness, acceptance, and action to improve health, including through the entertainment media, the news media, and social media. This report summarizes the presentations and discussion of the workshop.

These web pages from Faces and Voices of Recovery provide “Recovery Messaging” training to help people in recovery from addiction and their families to speak publicly about their experiences in a way that helps build public support for people getting the help they need to recover.  Featured tip sheets and other resources offers guidance on working with the media, outreach to policymakers, public speaking, and other kinds of messaging. 

The purpose of this workbook is to help public health program administrators understand what a “success story” is, why it is important to tell success stories, and how to develop success stories.

This guide provides people engaged in suicide prevention with the tools necessary to serve as effective media spokespersons and to generate media coverage in order to create awareness of this important issue. It can help them to understand the needs of the news media as part of an effective media outreach program.

This brief manual explores how media accounts can actually serve as a suicide prevention tool by: assisting news professionals to report responsibly and accurately; using a media request for information as an opportunity to influence the contents of the story; emphasizing the importance of listing available community resources for individuals at-risk and describing what is being done to promote safety for vulnerable individuals in the aftermath of a suicide; and warning against the aspects of news coverage that may promote copycat suicides.

The recommendations address how media covers an incident where a person (or a small group) shoots multiple others in a public setting. The tragedies at Columbine, Virginia Tech, Aurora and Orlando are examples of mass shootings. These recommendations are not intended to address gang violence or murder­ suicide (i.e. intimate partner violence).

Released in 2011 and updated in 2019, the Recommendations for Reporting on Suicide were developed by leading experts in suicide prevention and in collaboration with several international suicide prevention and public health organizations, schools of journalism, media organizations and key journalists as well as Internet safety experts. The research-based recommendations include suggestions for online media, message boards, bloggers, and “citizen journalists.”

Part of Australia’s Mindframe National Media initiative, this guide to help people working in suicide prevention and mental health promotion to effectively communicate with the media about suicide, mental health, and mental illness in a way that promotes sensitive and appropriate reporting. The guide includes suggestions for providing information about suicide, as well as general strategies for working with the media.