Depression, Medication, Acne and Suicide: A case study in the reporting and portrayal of suicide in Australia's metropolitan press.

This paper examines the framing of a health risk in Australian metropolitan newspapers using a case study of the reporting of a coroner’s court findings about the possible links between a teenager’s suicide, depression, and the acne prescription drug, Roaccutane. The paper focuses on a Sydney coroner’s court inquest into the suicide death of 14-year-old Vivian Crane. The findings were reported in the metropolitan press in Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane in October 2004. This paper investigates the interaction between news values and news frames in the reporting and portrayal of these findings and identifies some of the ways in which news outlets privileged certain news frames over others and, therefore, presented certain risks to the public at the expense of others.