Jason Arday, the press, and workplaces' responsibility to prevent suicide

Trigger warning: this piece discusses suicide, depression, death. Please do not read it if you are not in the right mental space to do so.

General note: this piece is very long (I got a notification that I nearly hit the length limit. What a feat!) and if you want to skip to the end please do.

I had a piece I planned to write today (about AI at work, which I will still do soon), but I have been unable to stop thinking about Jason Arday, a British academic who died over the weekend after resigning as a professor at the University of Cambridge following allegations of plagiarism (which he denied).

I’m scared to write about this topic. As a freelance journalist, I’m worried about the professional consequences of being critical of the press at large (will some editors read this piece and refuse to commission me?). I’m scared of getting ‘in trouble’ and upsetting people by sharing past experiences. I’m nervous, too, that by writing on this topic I’m speaking out of place (what right do I have?). I’m hesitant to discuss the ‘causes’ of someone’s suicide, especially when their death has not been confirmed as suicide.

(Due to these concerns, I might later paywall this newsletter, because while I would like everyone with good intentions and the willingness to understand to see it, I want to put a small hurdle to everyone reading it. Annoyingly Substack doesn’t allow you to just paywall parts of a piece so I’d have to do the majority.)

But I think I need to write through this to process it. I also want to do something, and that requires some help (at the end I’ll explain how. If you don’t read the rest, please scroll to the bottom and read that). I think that as a former staff journalist who has negotiated with taking part in similarly cruel, racist smear campaigns, I could bring some insight here. The same goes for being a ‘work expert’, and for having experienced online attacks that have pushed me close to suicide.

Anyone familiar with suicide, whether via their own suicidal thoughts or knowing someone who has died by or considered suicide, will be familiar with the grim sense of inevitability that comes alongside it. There’s a song I find really affecting – I saw it live and cried – called The Funeral by Band Of Horses. I don’t think this is its original intention, but the lyrics of the chorus – “at every occasion, I’ll be ready for the funeral” – make me think of two types of dread: the first, knowing someone living with addiction or depression and feeling like every phone call will be the one that says it happened, they died; the second, myself, the fear that one day suicide will ‘catch up with me’, find the very specific confluence of circumstances required to happen, and it’ll be other people getting that call. Suicide, for me, sometimes feels like a ‘when’ not an ‘if’, a pursuing presence that will always be a risk, sometimes in the distance, sometimes near.

I bring this up because I don’t think it’s helpful for people to place blame for someone’s suicide on one specific factor. That’s never the case. You can have two people go through the exact same awful things and one will respond with suicide, the other won’t. Equally, that same person could experience a sequence of events at one point in their life and ‘get away with it’ alive, then experience another at the precise wrong moment and end their lives. My point is that a mentally well person does not die by suicide. Often there are situational factors involved, but they do not act alone.

So, today I’m going to talk about two factors that I think are important. But I don’t think it’s fair or accurate to say either are wholly to blame. I do think, however, that there are things that we need to do better, and as someone working and writing in the area of work, that is the area I want to focus on. I believe that this is an area that, with change, could save lives. I would like to be a part of that change, but honestly, I have no idea how. I’ll get into how you might be able to help at the end of this newsletter. But first, let’s talk about those two factors: the press and work.

It’s a simple fact: Jason Arday did not deserve the intensity of the press coverage surrounding accusations against him. It’s been reported that outlets were told on multiple occasions the impact of the hundreds of articles written about him. In Jason’s resignation letter from Cambridge, he wrote: “While criticism is an inevitable part of academic life, what I have experienced has gone far beyond scholarly disagreement. The relentless accusations, speculation and public commentary have taken a profound toll on me and on those I love. […] I no longer wish to feel as though I am living under a constant spotlight, where every aspect of my life is subject to public examination and judgement.”

There has since been debate over whether any of this story, from the initial accusation of plagiarism onwards, should have been covered by the press. My view is that the initial stories were valid. The press need to be free to investigate and report matters that have an impact on the public – students were being taught by Jason Arday, and have a right to know if there are doubts about the veracity of his work – and that concern individuals who have been covered by the press previously. Multiple publications covered Jason Arday’s appointment as Cambridge’s youngest Black professor, detailing what he claimed as his life story, as being unable to speak until 11 and unable to read or write until 18. No one, I think, would object to this story being worthy of coverage by the mainstream media, and once that story had been covered, I think it’s reasonable that they would follow up with a story that brought the previous one into question. Anyone who genuinely believes that none of this should have been covered is proposing a shift into risky territory for the role of the press, and the media’s right to shine a light on wrongdoing.

Where this turned from a reasonable reporting of potential bad behaviour into an unjustified witch hunt is a difficult line to draw. But the line absolutely was crossed, both in terms of the volume of coverage (do the alleged lies of a Cambridge professor really deserve to take up multiple top-of-homepage spots? Is that truly the story most relevant and of interest to the British public?) and the tenuous reaches of what the man’s alleged wrongdoing justified covering. Why were publications reporting on claims about how much Jason Arday spoke in class from people claiming to have been his schoolmates?

There are a number of people who have done an incredible job pointing out how clearly what was initially reasonable coverage turned into a mass attack, and suggesting that the depth of coverage was motivated by racism. There have been comparisons to the coverage of other accused plagiarists who are white (which, of course, was far less in-depth to that of Jason Arday) and also to the coverage of people accused of far worse, further-reaching crimes. Jason Arday’s alleged actions could have had an impact on people, there’s no denying that. But that impact can in no way be considered as profound or far-reaching as that of men accused of sexual assault, claimed abusers, politicians who enable the deaths of thousands. So why, in multiple cases, did these people receive less invasive investigation into their pasts by a professor who may have lied about some facts of his life?

As a journalist of over a decade, I can confidently answer that question: the articles got clicks (also, racism, but as a white woman I’m not the person to break that down further). I have seen, over and over, how one story on an individual ‘does well’ (meaning a higher number of people than average clicked on that story), so those in charge will demand more, more, more of the same. It happens in much lower stakes constantly – a story about a celebrity getting a bob haircut gets picked up by Google Discover so gets a bunch of clicks, so an entire ‘strategy’ is created in which reporters are tasked with smashing out as many articles about that celebrity or bobs as possible.

This in itself is a huge problem that takes a lot of untangling, so I won’t go into it too much. But let me say at this point that journalism as an industry is crumbling. And for over a decade it has been driven by forces beyond editors’ whims or what individuals genuinely think is worth covering. A significant portion of online media has spent years chasing the tail of whatever big tech provider is most powerful at the moment. Because British media is so heavily sustained by advertisements, our press is of course skewed by what we cover, even subconsciously. Companies pay more money for publications that receive more clicks. Appease tech companies and they can deliver more clicks – tailor your content to make Google put it at the top of search results (not anymore, thanks to AI overviews!), tweak it to what Facebook is pushing to the most people (nah, they’ve stopped doing that), make it suited to a viral Twitter moment (that option has gone now too), make it upbeat so it’s more likely to be shared by people (oh good, someone’s just screenshotted the article and posted it on their ‘good news’ Instagram), actually make it more negative so people get angry and share it in rage (cool, a lot of people are now sending the writer death threats without even clicking to read the piece).

The fact is: in order for media companies to survive, for reporters to get paid even the meagre salaries they do, they need to make money. The way things have been and continue to worsen creates a media ecosystem that’s damaging in many ways. For one, large portions of it homogenise thinking or are just plain boring (how many bob haircuts can there be?). Then you consider the stories that get squashed down by anyone with enough money to momentarily keep a publication afloat. Or not written because they ‘won’t do traffic’ or ‘the algorithm doesn’t like them’.

I’ve seen a few people start to call out specific reporters whose bylines were on stories about Jason Arday, and I think that’s a mistake. It’s to ignore the broader system writers are working under – even the big name columnists and reporters. It’s not only the entire business model and environment that subtly encourages writers to write increasingly extreme takes, but also the editors explicitly ordering writers to cover certain stories in certain ways. Job stability as a journalist is… yikes. The risk of redundancies is real. Anyone working in journalism will have a voice (in the back of their head or shouted in their ear from a boss) telling them that they need to get clicks and prove their value or they will lose their jobs.

Combine this with editors and bosses who choose to cover stories that are actively damaging – say a racist hit piece rather than another bob story – and the press is in a very dangerous place.

Let me tell you a few (hopefully brief) stories to illustrate the kind of dynamics happening here.

In one of my staff jobs I kept clashing with an editor. Many of these clashes were over silly things (sharks! Alligators!), but some I think are important, and I regret that I wasn’t able to push harder for my side. One of these was Munroe Bergdorf.

It’s been such a long time that you might not remember how Munroe Bergdorf first entered the media space. In 2017, the Mail Online splashed the story over its homepage: a Black, transgender model who had landed a campaign with L’Oreal had made comments on Facebook about ‘the racial violence of white people’, and, a few hours later, the story was updated to say L’Oreal had sacked her. I was a lifestyle reporter at the time, lifestyle covered fashion and beauty, so I popped a task on the newsroom’s shared doc for myself – I thought Munroe’s comments were entirely fair and that L’Oreal had made the wrong call, so I reached out to Munroe to see if she would be interviewed or write a piece defending herself. I felt strongly that the Mail had been wrong to dig around this woman’s Facebook history to drag her down. She was not a person in power, her Facebook posts hadn’t been seen by many people (and, again, were valid), she wasn’t attempting to influence other people. There was no justification, I felt, for the story in the first place.

An hour after I put my proposed headline on the doc, I saw the story on the publication I worked for’s homepage, front and centre, already live, with an angle almost exactly replicating the Mail’s take. I was immensely frustrated. I felt it was unfair and false to declare that Munroe had “said all whites are racist”. I also, more selfishly, thought it was a very sneaky act to (I believe) quickly write up the story knowing that my approach would have taken longer, and to not put it on the shared doc until after it was live, to chase clicks for the editor’s byline rather than mine. I silently raged. I said and did nothing because I was far more junior and, again selfishly, didn’t want to get shouted at. The news story meant that Munroe would of course not want to be interviewed by or write for the publication.

Now, I understand that the news editor was also under immense pressure to do this. Back then I was outraged. But I didn’t quit. So I’m very much complicit.

As I progressed in seniority, I felt more able to actually argue with that editor. I did a terrible job every time, crying immediately and always losing, but I’m glad I pushed back. I’m glad I pushed back on the description of abuse towards Kate Middleton as racist while Meghan Markle’s abuse was not categorised as such so clearly. I’m glad I pushed back on the way my team’s series, The State of Racism, was suddenly ended. I’m glad, on a much more minor level, that I kicked off about a number of stories that were, in my opinion, clearly, obviously false, including one about a dog whose ears fell off after being dyed red (the image of one of the ‘ears’ was cut from a piece of fabric. I will always maintain that) and another about a pastor being eaten by an alligator. Even if my crying and complaints had no impact (although I hope maybe they slightly changed the editor’s mind? Maybe made him consider an opposing view? Please?), I can at least rest easy knowing I expressed my thoughts.

There is something I definitely can’t rest easy about. Once, I got thoroughly cancelled due to an incident that to this day brings me huge amounts of shame and at the time pushed me close to suicide. I wrote an opinion piece about the importance of parents teaching their teenage children about masturbation, as I felt (and still feel) that sexual pleasure is important and it’s better to explore it alone than to be at risk of health problems and issues of consent. However, because I was so mentally entangled with the notion that getting page views at any cost was how I would solidify my self-worth, I wrote and headlined this view in the most inflammatory way possible, suggesting that parents should buy their kids sex toys. I entirely forgot that there are evil people in this world who sexually abuse their own children. That’s the only way I can explain it. I forgot. I thought everyone would read it with the best intentions in mind. I was wrong. The article was edited and later taken down, but not before multiple US publications and individuals on social media had written about how evil and depraved I was. I was wrong to write it. I will always, always regret it. But it also makes me understand why journalists write things that are, in my view, morally wrong. It’s so easy to become enmeshed in the page views trap. Similarly, I have some understanding of why influencers go online and say and do objectionable things. The algorithms reward you for increasing extremity until you cross a line that’s blurred by the high of receiving attention.

Another, more recent, regret. I was asked by a fellow journalist for my thoughts on Jameela Jamil for an article. I should have asked for the angle, the headline, the publication. I didn’t, and my quotes filled up a significant portion of an article titled ‘Why Jameela Jamil is the most annoying woman on the internet’. I feel awful for this. I disagree with Jameela Jamil on many levels and we have argued1 about her proclivity for publicly calling out female journalists (primarily for the reasons I listed above, and because her fanbase has on multiple occasions reacted by attacking the journalist – at times one who had committed a truly minor error – in droves that could be awful for their mental health2). But in (unintentionally) participating in this article, I caused harm to Jameela’s mental wellbeing and partook in an attack that I think was unfair. Two wrongs just make things more wrong.

Anyway. I don’t think it’s right to attack individual journalists for coverage of Jason Arday, or to assign blame to them. They are operating within a larger system, and, as someone who has been suicidal multiple times in part as a result of social media attacks, which I’ll get into in a bit, I think this only risks further harm and the potential for more loss of life.

However, we do need to hold to account the editors, the media bosses, the press system as a whole, the tech companies that reward this kind of coverage. There is a petition online that demands a public inquiry into ‘how to ensure a responsible press given its contribution to Dr Arday’s tragic death’. I strongly, strongly urge you to read the letter and sign it.

Of course the press coverage of Jason Arday had an impact. That, to me, is indisputable. Of course there’s change needed, and that will only happen with real pushback.

I remember another incident at a former workplace where I signed the publication up to a mental health media charter, which required agreeing to certain commitments such as ‘do your best to’ write that someone ‘died by suicide’ rather than ‘committed suicide’, not publishing triggering images of people in active eating disorders, and to avoid linking terrorist attacks with general ‘mental health issues’ without making it clear that in the majority of cases, mentally unwell people harm themselves not others. The editor and deputy editor of the publication had both given me their sign-off. Someone else complained to someone more senior, who “lost their shit” at the editor and made us unsign it. This was nearly a decade ago, but I think it paints an interesting picture. Someone at the top of the press ecosystem was absolutely outraged by the suggestion of ‘doing our best’ to not say ‘commit suicide’, even with detailed explanation of the potential harm. I couldn’t get the commitment through. It will be hard work to get the press at large to take responsibility for the potential impact of their coverage of Jason Arday, and even more hard work to make the system operate differently.

I can speak to the impact of a pile-on as someone who has experienced the tiniest portion of what Jason Arday endured.

As someone who has lived with depression since my teens, I have been suicidal many times. I have come very close to acting on these thoughts many times. Of those times, two coincided with attacks and mass attention on social media. Another coincided with being made redundant (I’ll explore that more in the ‘work’ section soon). I feared for my life after receiving physical threats following the Good Morning Britain clapping incident (I’ve written about that on my other newsletter, linked below, so won’t rehash it here) and as the bashing of me as a ‘moron’ continued, I internalised it and came close to ending my life.

When I wrote a story about quiet quitting for one of my previous places of employment, people in droves accused me of being a bootlicker, racist, idiotic, and a few suggested I kill myself. I remember distinctly being at a friend’s wedding, going to the toilets and sobbing as I worked out various means of suicide, scrolling through the hate.

Again, let me state here, in both cases if I had completed suicide, neither situation would have been entirely ‘to blame’. It was that unfortunate combination of timing, mental illness, other factors happening at the same time, that pushed me to the brink. But would those attacks have contributed? Absolutely.

These experiences give me a great deal of worry when I see a huge amount of negative press coverage of an individual, such as Jason Arday. They are why I was not remotely surprised when Meghan Markle said she considered suicide during her “character assassination”. They’re why I feel so awful about that Jameela Jamil article, where when providing the quotes I hadn’t been cognisant of the amount of negative press attention she had received in the previous weeks (an unforgivable error). I believe it’s a truth: experiencing a relentless onslaught of criticism online can contribute to someone’s death, and that is something the press as a whole needs to consider.

Work-related suicides have been on my mind a lot recently. In personal experience, the experience of redundancy hugely upped my suicidal thoughts. I’m grateful I’ve come through the worst of that. The story of Chloe Moffat, a 26-year-old who took her own life after a meeting pre-empting a disciplinary process at The Treasury where she worked, has stuck with me. Her mother explicitly called on the Treasury to change the way it handled disciplinary matters like Chloe’s, stating: “Had Chloe been properly supported and advised of her rights before the meeting, she would not have been so devastated and isolated.” A coroner found that The Treasury “materially contributed” to Chloe’s death.

I wrote about this case at the time, asking about what responsibility workplaces have to look after workers’ mental wellbeing:

And I’m thinking about it again in regards to Jason Arday. Cambridge University hired Jason Arday as a professor, seemingly having not investigated the story Jason presented – or, if they had, choosing to hire him anyway (as far as I can tell. There is not yet public reporting on any checks Cambridge University conducted prior to hiring the professor). If Jason Arday was untruthful, that deception would be his responsibility. But his role, and – if there were failures in the university’s processes – being enabled to ‘get away with’ that deception, is the university’s. In hiring him, I believe they had an obligation to stand by that decision, and when claims of plagiarism emerged, to acknowledge what could be their own failure to find and address any discrepancies or dishonesty.

Let me be clear: I am not suggesting that once a company hires someone, they have to keep them employed forever, regardless of any wrongdoing, poor performance, or monetary reasons such as in the case of redundancies. It is absolutely correct that workplaces have disciplinary proceedings, that they investigate allegations against staff, and that they take action as a result. No one should just airily wave away issues and say ‘well, we hired ‘em, guess we’ve got to keep them’.

But what I do believe is that in those processes, and even when they’re not happening and someone is just cracking along with their job as normal, workplaces have a responsibility to take care of their staff’s mental health. That doesn’t mean walking on eggshells or letting them get away with bad behaviour or poor performance. But it certainly means acknowledging workers as humans whose mental wellbeing can be affected by the work they do.

The University of Cambridge said they provided support to Jason during the investigation into the claims against him. We don’t know if that support was adequate. Following Jason’s death, the university said: “Our support continued in the face of intense public and media scrutiny and after his resignation. Our thoughts and deepest condolences are with Jason’s family and loved ones at this extremely difficult time.”

I, along with (I assume) many others, wonder if more could have been done on the end of Jason Arday’s former employers to save him. I wonder the same about those handling Chloe Moffat’s working experience.

There is no official and exact number of suicides that are triggered in part by work. We know that certain industries have higher rates of suicide, which perhaps points to greater need of change within them. But I find the idea of any work-related suicides atrocious. We should not accept that something we currently all have to do to survive can be so mentally ruinous – whether that’s high levels of stress, brutal shift patterns, workplace bullying, burnout, boreout – that it could contribute towards someone’s death.

In the UK, ‘work-related suicide’ is not a legal term. Deaths only have to be reported to governing bodies when someone dies as a result of a ‘work-related accident’. There is no clearly defined path for making a legal claim that someone’s workplace contributed towards their suicide. In other countries, there are – according to The British Safety Council, in France “suicide is considered a workplace risk with employers required to prove to an investigator that a suicide of one of their employees was not work-related.”

I mentioned at the top of this newsletter that I need your help, and here’s where it comes. I have been thinking for a while about campaigning to end work-related suicide, and to have it legally recognised in the UK. The problem is I have no idea what that would look like – what should workplaces be doing? How would I go about making that a legal requirement?

I have ideas. Like: mandatory training of all managers and HR on recognising someone’s vulnerability to suicide, the provision of support that goes far beyond ‘Employee Assistance Lines’ that tell you your issue is too complex or ‘stress risk assessments’ that tell workers they’re at risk and then do little to nothing to resolve it, enforced clarity and honesty in processes of disciplinaries and redundancies. But there are likely things I haven’t considered that would be more effective, and I would need to talk to mental health and work experts to uncover these. Also, there are challenges for workplaces that I don’t know how to get around, such as the money to enable this kind of mental health support.

If one of my life’s accomplishments were to reduce the number of suicides linked to work, I would be immensely proud. But it’s such a big task that I don’t know how to even begin. I also have to acknowledge the fact that I’m a freelance journalist who has to keep earning enough to pay the mortgage. A solo campaign would take more time than I can afford. Doing it without the backing of a full-time workplace (which, in all honesty, I’m not mentally ready to go back to yet3) or some larger organisation that will keep me afloat financially seems impossible.

So, my plea, here: if you know of anyone already campaigning and making headway in this area, please could you point me in their direction? If you know of a way I can contribute even a tiny bit, could you let me know? And if you read the above and think something like: ‘actually, you could campaign while continuing to freelance and write fiction, it’s easier than you think and I have information or experience that might help you do that’, please could you get in touch?

With Working On Purpose, so much of my mission is to enable everyone to work in a happier, healthier way, through both individual action and bigger changes to the working world (increased flexibility! Fair pay! Adequate training! The provision of interesting and fulfilling work!). I think that there’s a huge amount of work to be done on the world of work, and people far more qualified than me who are tackling issues such as unsafe working practices and fair pay. But this specific change, to prevent work from being so mentally damaging that it results in suicide, feels like one I might have value in contributing to. So, help me contribute. Use me however I can be used to end work-related suicide.

Apologies for the length of this article and simultaneously that it doesn’t (can’t) cover everything more in-depth. There are entire books to be written about individual journalists’ moral responsibilities, the impact of the media, the dire state of our current press landscape, racism in the press, racism in academics, why suicide is so complex to understand, and on and on and on. I’m sad I can’t do more for all these issues.

Also, on this newsletter specifically, I’ve been writing this piece for many hours and need to go and take care of myself. Drink some water. Sleep. You know the drill. I was sick with some awful mystery bug last week that meant I lost out on work (and thus money) and while I feel pretty much recovered I need to keep an eye on myself. So. Stopping typing. Now.

Thank you for reading. And WOP subscribers, see you soon with a newsletter on AI at work.