Int. J. Environ. Res. Public Health 2012, 9 132 increase in suicidal behaviours after publicized suicide stories than for protective effects. Only six research articles evaluated the protective effect of media coverage, caused either by newspaper blackout, by reducing the quantity of reporting or by changing the quality of media reporting, and observed subsequent decrease in suicidality [10,21,35,38,42,72]. It has been argued that certain individuals are more vulnerable to incorporate the idea and act of suicide into their concepts of self and one possible source for learning is media [76]. Several studies included in the current review proposed the suicide contagion effect of media reporting to be present only for specific vulnerable groups, as the degree of media influence is contingent on audience receptivity [36]. Subsequent similar suicides indicate strong modelling effect based on age [21,30,31,58,66,67,68] and gender [21,53,58,61,67,68]. These notions can be explained by differential identification theory, which takes age and gender as key dimensions of social life upon people build a sense of identity [77]. The fact that media-induced contagious effect has been highlighted more among young people and especially among elderly leads to the conclusion that suicide rates of the middle- aged people are less related to imitative suicide [74,77]. This is probably due to relatively low level of suicidogenic life conditions for middle-aged people. Unlike elderly, the middle-aged people have comparatively good health and are financially well off. Compared to the young, they are more settled into society’s institutional framework, including marriage, the family, work and politics [77]. One important issue which can not be neglected when assessing media influence is reporting on specific suicide methods. Studies included in the current systematic review revealed how media reports ‘advertised’ several dramatic and highly lethal suicide methods: burning [44], charcoal burning [44,66,68,69], shooting [49], jumping [51,52,58], railway suicide [71], and subway suicide [35,38,42]. Studies about newsworthiness of suicide have found that media reports are not representative to official suicide data and tend to exaggerate certain types of suicides, like suicides by celebrities and suicides involving unusual circumstances or methods [78]. The methods of drowning, jumping, shooting and rare methods are more likely to be reported than hanging [79], which is actually the most frequent suicide method in many countries. Most of the studies have focused on short-term effect (e.g., from 1–2 days to 3–4 weeks) of media reporting, which is highly relevant period for provoking fatal and non-fatal suicidal acts. However, suicidal ideation (suicidal thoughts in the community) have found to be influenced by a publicized celebrity suicide for a longer, approximately 1-year period [62]. The long-term effect becomes probably even more important in the contemporary world, where majority of the newspapers are electronic and easily accessible in the Internet for an undetermined period of time. The Internet is global medium, which makes it difficult to determine specific area and exact dose of media reporting. These facts challenge research methods for evaluating associations between media reporting and subsequent suicidal behaviours. The majority of studies about associations between media and suicidality follow the tradition of quantitative evaluation of media reporting, which fails to take into account the capacity of audience to make meaning out of message. Quantitative method could be complemented by examining qualitatively the multiple meanings that audiences give to media messages [80]. Niederkrotenthaler and colleagues [72] have applied both content analysis and quantitative evaluation and reached to novel findings about possibilities to provide suicide-protective effect by advertising positive coping in adverse circumstances. Even more, the readers can be active agents in constructing reality in media.