Council reprimands Yle over false claim about elderly suicides

Finland’s Council for Mass Media has reprimanded Yle for failing to correct a false claim about suicide rates among older people, Yle reported.

The claim appeared in the programme description for an episode of Tosi tarina on Yle Areena’s Radio Guide. The description said that while Finland’s suicide rate had been declining for a long time, suicides among older people were increasing. The episode, titled “A hopeless ending – suicides among older people”, was published on 14 January 2026.

The council said the claim was inaccurate. Statistics Finland’s cause-of-death data show that both the number and the share of suicides among people over 65 have declined in recent decades.

The council found that Yle breached section 35 of the Guidelines for Journalists, which requires significant factual errors to be corrected as soon as possible after they come to the newsroom’s attention. The decision was made by council chair Eero Hyvönen and published on Friday, 2 October 2026.