"There is a trivialisation of the seriousness of the acts," said Cristina Soeiro, a psychologist from the Judicial Police (PJ), who has long studied arsonists.

According to the expert, just referring "fire season" or showing a map of Portugal to covered in orange and red is a way to "normalise and trivialise the news," and the widespread coverage on the television with images of burning forests, "is excessive and can have the effect of boosting the situation."

"You can not just say it's on fire. This is not productive. Instead of focusing on the images of the fire, they should focus interviews of the people responsible for making decisions, what could be wrong, the consequences of the fire so people think a little about the fact that whatever they do in the forest is their responsibility," Soeiro said.

The PJ has been monitoring arsonists since 1997. So far about 600 individuals have been studied, allowing the arsonists to be divided into "three big groups."

Soeiro points out that the most frequent group (55%) is usually associated with three factors: cognitive deficit, alcoholism and other mental health problems, such as autism.

The second most frequent group (40-44%) includes the people who use the fire for "revenge or retaliation" either to "catch the attention of others or solve problems of land division," but this profile has declined steadily in recent years.

The third group - the smalleste ("no more than 6%") - is made up of people "taking advantage of a fire," including setting fire to clear land.

There are also those who receive "small amounts [of cash] to set fire to an area," and this third group does not include "the presence of an organized crime profile," she said.

As arsonists are, for the most part, vulnerable people, Soeiro said that news coverage can have a positive effect, if it is moderate and tries to cover "the complete news - not only the burning forests, but also the consequences, of all that is lost, of the absence of animals."

However, the PJ psychologist noted that there is "no structured study" that shows that the images of burning forests "have an activating effect on individuals, especially in the group at greatest risk."

"From my point of view, as a psychiatrist, there is a manifest exaggeration in the broadcast of images of fires," psychiatrist Carlos Braz Saraiva, from the Faculty of Medicine of the University of Coimbra that as a forensic psychiatrist studied arsonists in the great fires of 2003 and 2005, told Lusa.

The psychiatrist noted that most arsonists have "very vulnerable personalities," and that extensive coverage can have a negative impact, recalling the case of a young man in the Açor moutain range who confessed to enjoying seeing the planes and helicopters flying over his area.

"It is a sideshow and there should be self-regulation" of the coverage of the fires, he warned.