Madness, media & mental illness: a social constructionist approach

Abstract

Background Depictions of mental illnesses in the mass media have been analysed and criticised for more than forty years with little improvement, and that has serious implications for the ongoing efforts to destigmatise both mental illnesses and those who suffer from them. Aims To examine media depictions of mental illnesses within a social constructionist framework. To identify why media depictions take the form they do and to indicate ways in which such practices may be more effectively addressed. Method Items chosen from factual media genres were subjected to discourse analysis. This form of analysis attends to the preferred meaning of the items and how that meaning is constructed within the item. Exemplars of such analysis are contrasted with the content analyses more commonly performed on media materials before reporting analyses of items from everyday media reports and of materials that were expected to be less stigmatising. Results Irrespective of the form of analysis it is found that media depictions of mental illnesses are dominated by representations of dangerousness, criminal violence, unpredictability, and social incompetence. The same features were found in a destigmatisation documentary and a series of backgrounders on mental health services, in both of which madness was utilised to create interest and drama. It is argued that these characteristics occur because media personnel, like most laypersons, represent mental illnesses as forms of madness. Conclusions That my social constructionist analysis is able to account for the lack of change in media depictions over forty years. That the preference for a public mental health approach to destigmatisation is misplaced because it is unable to address the fear generated by lay understandings of mental illnesses. That the attempt to avoid conflation of the person with the disorder in Diagnostic and Statistical Manuals beginning in 1980 was an inadequate step in an appropriate direction in that it sought to remind clinicians that a mental disorder does not make a person non-human. The thesis findings are interpreted as showing that destigmatisation requires a new way of depicting mental illnesses, one that privileges the individual's experience and their ordinary humanness.