Making Mental Health News

Abstract

This study is based on interviews with Australian journalists about their experiences of reporting on mental health issues, including how they see their role and their views about characteristics of newsworthy stories and sources and reporting challenges. The analysis draws out the following themes: exposing problems with psychiatry and mental health care; highlighting gaps between rhetoric and reality; humanising case studies; putting vulnerable people at risk; and negotiating pushy and shy sources. The study draws upon the concept of biocommunicability to consider these themes in the context of biomedical authority, patient-consumer and public sphere orientations to reporting. Journalists tended to convey a public sphere orientation, but they also gave examples of how the concerns of sources and audiences could work against this. The study suggests that factors such as competition for funding within the mental health field and pressures within the media industry play an important role in shaping the models of biocommunicability found in mental health news and in the mediatised practices of actors within the mental health field. The article argues that a preoccupation with the potential harms of reporting could work to constrain journalism that challenges and moves beyond the privileging of biomedical authority and patient-consumer models.

KEYWORDS:

• biocommunicability
• biomediatisation
• health journalism
• journalism
• journalism studies
• media
• media criticism
• mental health

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would like to thank the journalists who participated in the research, Professor R. Warwick Blood for his feedback on an earlier draft of this paper and the journal reviewers for their valuable feedback.

DISCLOSURE STATEMENT

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 The study is part of a larger project analysing media reporting in combination with semi-structured interviews and focus groups with journalists, people with lived experience, people working in advocacy organisations, mental health professionals and researchers, and the general community.

2 Two did not respond and one expressed an interest in being interviewed but a time could not be arranged within the timeframe of the study. All but one of the journalists interviewed were female and the two who did not reply to my email were males.

3 The Hearing Voices Network is well-known within the mental health service user movement internationally (see Blackman 2007; Crossley 2004) and there are hearing voices groups in Australia.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by an Australian Research Council Discovery Early Career Researcher Award [DE140100100 “Mediating Mental Health: An Integrated Approach to Investigating Media and Social Actors”].