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Advocacy Unlimited Newsletter - June/July 2006

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Corrigan said that the future research ought to review coverage of mental illness both in smaller local newspapers and on radio and television. A more complex analysis might be helpful as well.

"They must also examine how the form of the information (printed word and picture compared with sound bite compared with video) has impact on the message," he said.

One way to continue the trend he discerns in mental health coverage might be to increase coverage of ways to help mentally ill people, he said. "I would hope that reporters would write more about what the community can do to improve their status and care."

But getting the news media to understand mental health issues and reduce stigmatic portrayals of mentally ill individuals is no simple task, said epidemiologist Heather L. Stuart, Ph.D., of Queens University in Kingston, Ontario, in an interview. Stuart documented the effects of an intervention with a daily newspaper in Calgary several years ago.

Positive stories about mental health outnumbered negative ones by 2 to 1 both before and after the intervention, which included giving reporters more accurate background information and inviting an editorial writer to participate in an antistigma action team. However, negative coverage increased after the intervention, probably because there were several murders committed during the same period by persons identified as "untreated schizophrenics."

"You just have no control over that," said Stuart. "They don't even have to be local crimes. People see or read about terrible things happening in Japan or at Columbine."

Formal programs to intervene with local media are unlikely to help much, she said. Instead, she recommended offering fact-based information for the online background file that most papers maintain today; suggesting (in advance) expert sources, both patients and doctors; and maintaining informal channels of communication.

"Take a reporter to lunch every couple of months," she advised. "If you approach reporters in a positive way, you can find listeners. Establish trust and friendship, and then hope they develop a mutual interest in mental health."

This could pay off for all involved, said Stuart. One reporter won an award form a Canadian mental health organization for a series of articles on schizophrenia.

Perhaps even more important are stories that should address mental health issues but never mention the subject, said former New York Times correspondent Catherine S. Manegold, now the James M. Cox Jr. Professor of Journalism at Emory University in Atlanta and a member of the advisory board for the Rosalynn Carter Fellowships for Mental Health Journalism.

"Reporters and editors just miss it," she said in an interview. "They might mention poverty or other factors that underlie a story, but miss the ball entirely on mental health issues. It's easy not to think it through when you're on deadline."

Such articles would be hard to find and quantify because the keywords would not be visible to researchers, she said.

Newspapers generally do not have policies regarding mental health stories, said Manegold. But reporters who know or meet someone with mental illness may develop an interest in the area and write about it with accuracy and sympathy. Their ideas will percolate around the newsroom as fellow reporters read their stories and thus improve coverage.

Psychiatric News June 17, 2005 Volume 40 Number 12
©2005 American Psychiatric Association p.18

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