Are lazy journalists to blame for mental health stigma?

According to an article on Canada.com, media coverage of mental illness in Canada is ‘overwhelmingly negative’ after researchers analysed news articles and TV transcripts. Rob Whitley, one of the researchers on the study, said: “We see a lot of lazy journalism.”

Apparently the shorter the news article, the more likely it is also to be stigmatising. The study, which looked at almost 9,000 articles published between 2005 and 2010 that mentioned any of the terms ‘mental health’, ‘mental illness’, ‘schizophrenia’ and schizophrenic’, showed that danger violence and criminality were direct themes in 39% of the newspaper articles while only 17% had a theme of recovery or rehabilitation.

29% of the articles were “directly stigmatising’ and 84% did not quote a person with a mental illness and 74% had not bothered with obtaining a quote from an expert. It is not a secret that in today’s media, with fewer journalists covering more stories due to economic cutbacks and tighter deadlines, there might be a tendency to cut corners and that some journalists unfortunately don’t spend enough time to get all the information needed to report a story the best they can.

Fortunately, with the rise of blogs and crowd sourced news websites, everyone is able to have a voice these days – for good and bad. Only by writing about mental health, sharing personal experiences and showing people that it is a disease like any other, can we combat the stigma.

If you write about mental health, please share your link in the comments below.

Let us bring mental health out from the shadows!