A Qualitative Analysis of the Portrayal of Young People and Psychosis in Australian News Reports

ABSTRACT

News media plays an influential role in shaping society’s understanding of mental illness and can promote perspectives ranging from those that promote help-seeking behaviour to stigmatised associations with attributes such as danger and violence. Stigma has been found to have significant negative impacts on people with psychosis. No existing studies have explored how young people with psychosis are represented in newspapers. Targeting this gap, this study analysed news articles relating to youth psychosis to determine the types of discourses used. We searched the ProQuest Australia and New Zealand Newsstream database (2011-2016) for Australian newspaper articles related to young people and psychosis. Qualitative analysis was used to identify content and these were arranged into key themes. The recurring themes evident in the 27 articles linked youth psychosis to illicit drug use, violence and professional infighting about treatment options, and thus promoted significantly stigmatised perspectives of youth psychosis. Acknowledgement of these stigmatised discourses is important for encouraging responsible media reporting and for understanding the social messages impacting on treatment and help-seeking by young people. We discuss the conflicted role of journalists in presenting information about mental illness and recommend development of a more solutions-focused approach to reporting in this area.

KEYWORDS:

• Adolescence
• Australia
• newspapers
• psychosis
• stigma
• young people
• mental illness

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Data availability statement

The list of newspaper texts analysed in the final data set is available if requested.

Notes

1 Each number represents a separate newspaper Article.