Int. J. Environ. Res. Public Health 2012, 9 1. Introduction 124 In suicide prevention one of the recognised public health approaches is responsible media reporting on suicidal behaviours [1,2]. Notions about suicidal contagion after reporting cases of suicide in newspapers go back to 19th century medical literature [3]. In the literature, suicide contagion is also referred to as imitative, copycat or mass cluster suicide. Associations between media portrayal and suicidal behaviours has been a subject of research for decades. Although the media is only one feature of the social environment in which suicidal behaviours can be learned [4] and the effect is probably smaller than that of other psychosocial risk factors for suicide [5], it is a significant agent in social construction of reality, especially for vulnerable persons. Several countries and organisations—e.g., the World Health Organisation, the Samaritans, the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention—have launched and disseminated the resources to educate and empower media professionals [6-10]. Studies are available, which are cross-sectional and analyse whether the method of reporting about suicidal behaviours in newspapers is in line with the recommendations of international best practices [11-13]. There is also evidence, albeit from fewer studies, that modification of reporting on suicidal behaviour is feasible and can be effective [10,14]. Several studies have measured the style of media reporting about suicide before and after recommendations for media were launched [9,15] or before and after the trainings for editors and journalists were given [16,17]. Even if the intensity of reporting about suicide can increase after these interventions, the quality in terms of preventive accent of media coverage tend to improve [17]. As these studies do not include clear outcome measure related to suicidal behaviours, the conclusions about possible suicide preventive impact of such interventions remain ambiguous. The question how does modification of media reporting influence actual suicidal behaviours is much more interesting and challenging. The aim of the current systematic review was to monitor and give an overview of the research performed about the roles of media in suicide prevention in order to find out possible effects media reporting on suicidal behaviours might have on actual suicidality, that is on completed suicides, attempted suicides and suicidal ideation. 2. Experimental Section The systematic review was performed following the principles of the PRISMA statement [18]. The results of the identification, screening, eligibility assessment, and inclusion of the articles is presented using PRISMA 2009 Flow Diagram with minor modifications (Figure 1). A literature search of publications included in the electronic databases was conducted in July 2011 using MEDLINE (via PubMed), PsychINFO (via EBSCOHOST) and Cochrane Library. The search criteria was the occurrence of the combination of two keywords—suicid* and media—either in the title, abstracts or keywords of the publication. In total, 1,180 articles were identified through database searching (MEDLINE n = 588, PsychINFO n = 584, Cochrane Library n = 8). After the duplicates were removed, the number of publications included into the screening process was 981.