Media – Mental Health Matters

Research Paper Title

Swedish Mental Health Nurses’ Experiences of Portrayals of Mental Illness in Public Media.

Background

News reporting about mental illness lack perspectives of the mentally ill themselves and it is almost exclusively psychiatrists who are accessed when healthcare staff is consulted.

The perspective of mental health nurses might contribute to the public understanding of mental illness.

The purpose of this study was to describe mental health nurses’ experiences of how mental illness is portrayed in media.

Methods

Eight semi-structured interviews were conducted with qualified mental health nurses.

Results

A qualitative content analysis resulted in three categories:

Negative portrayals of mental illness;
Inconclusive images of mental illness; and
Biased dissemination of different perspectives.

Conclusions

The conclusion of this study is that mental health nurses experience media portrayals of mental illness as negative and misleading with too much emphasis on the medical perspective while a holistic mental health nursing perspective is heavily obscured.

Mental health nurses need to take a more prominent role in public reporting on mental health to resolve the current lack of relevant facts regarding mental illness.

Further research is needed regarding portrayals of mental illness in social media and how the current lack of perspectives affects public perceptions of mental illness.

In addition, further studies regarding the viewpoints of journalists reporting on mental illness are required.

Reference

Lilieqvist, M., Kling, S., Hallen, M. & Jormfeldt, H. (2020) Swedish Mental Health Nurses’ Experiences of Portrayals of Mental Illness in Public Media. Issues in Mental Health Nursing. 41(4), pp.348-354. doi: 10.1080/01612840.2019.1658244. Epub 2019 Nov 25.

Research Paper Title

Turkish newspaper articles mentioning people with mental illness: A retrospective study.

Background

Because a great majority of the public knows about mental disorders primarily through printed or visual media, the attitudes exhibited in mass media might be predictive in stigmatizing individuals with mental disorders.

The aim of this study was to retrospectively assess the articles in Turkish newspapers that mention individuals with mental disorders.

Methods

This study was designed to retrospectively investigate and analyze newspaper content in Turkey; the newspapers’ circulation information was collected by examining the websites of the four newspapers with above 1% of the total circulation.

The News Evaluation Form was used to evaluate a sampling of articles that met the inclusion criteria of having appeared in the lifestyle and agenda pages of newspapers, and of using neutral or negative labelling keywords about psychiatric patients.

Results

Almost all the articles reviewed were negative toward individuals with mental disorders.

Three quarters of the reports were forensic, among which two thirds of the individuals with mental disorders were criminalised, and one third were victims of crime.

In approximately half of the news reports, most images were related to the news and were not protected.

Although not all the articles contain stigmatising elements directed toward people with mental disorders, two thirds of the subjects’ images in the news were found to have stigmatising elements.

Conclusions

Media has an impact on attitudes toward people with mental disorders mostly negatively along with individual experiences and peer interactions.

Reference

Aci, O.S., Ciydem, E., Bilgin, H., Ozaslan, Z. & Tek, S. (2020) Turkish newspaper articles mentioning people with mental illness: A retrospective study. The International Journal of Social Psychiatry. doi: 10.1177/0020764019894609. [Epub ahead of print].