Kate Holland

The Role of the Fatosphere in Fat Adults’ Responses to Obesity Stigma A Model of Empowerment Without a Focus on Weight Loss

Obese adults face pervasive and repeated weight-based stigma. Few researchers have explored how obese individuals proactively respond to stigma outside of a dominant weight-loss framework. Using a grounded theory approach, we explored the experiences of 44 bloggers within the Fatosphere—an online fat-acceptance community. We investigated participants’ pathways into the Fatosphere, how they responded to and interacted with stigma, and how they described the impact of fat acceptance on their health and well-being. The concepts and support associated with the fat-acceptance movement helped participants shift from reactive strategies in responding to stigma (conforming to dominant discourses through weight loss) to proactive responses to resist stigma (reframing “fat” and self-acceptance). Participants perceived that blogging within the Fatosphere led them to feel more empowered. Participants also described the benefits of belonging to a supportive community, and improvements in their health and well-being. The Fatosphere provides an alternative pathway for obese individuals to counter and cope with weight-based stigma.

'Our girth is plain to see': An analysis of newspaper coverage of Australia's Future 'Fat Bomb'

The news media plays an important role in making visible and shaping public understandings of health and health risks. In relation to overweight and obesity, it has been suggested that the media is more likely to engage in alarmist reporting in a climate in which it is taken for granted that obesity is an ‘epidemic’. This study analyses Australian media coverage of a report on overweight and obesity, Australias Future ‘Fat Bomb’: a report on the long-term consequences of Australias expanding waistline on cardiovascular disease, by one of Australia’s leading health and medical research institutes. Our study found that the report was consistently framed across media outlets as showing that Australia is the ‘fattest nation’ in the world, having overtaken the Americans. This is despite the fact that the Fat Bomb study did not include international comparisons and was based only on data from middle-aged Australians. Because reports of increasing rates of obesity had already been widely covered in the media, the press needed to find a new way of signifying the problem, which was provided by comments made by its lead author in publicising the report. Consistent with previous research, there was a notable absence of critical commentary on the study and a failure to test the claims of its lead author. We conclude that this reporting could have contributed to a policy environment in which the perceived threat of obesity is deemed to be so great that efforts to contain it may be subjected to less scrutiny than they warrant.

Risky News, Madness and Public Crisis A Case Study of the Reporting and Portrayal of Mental Health and Illness in the Australian Press

This case study investigates the central role of news frames in constructing risk knowledge for newspaper readers. In Brisbane in 2001-02, a psychiatric patient absconded from a city mental health facility and within a month a second patient had absconded from another facility. A mental health tribunal had previously judged each man as medically unfit to stand trial for separate murders they had committed. The media coverage culminated in a complaint to the Australian Press Council, which resolved the concerns by mediation. The study has implications for how Australian and other western news media routinely frame people diagnosed with mental illness.

The Epistemological Bias of Ethics Review Constraining Mental Health Research

This article investigates the concerns of a university research ethics committee in rejecting an application to interview people diagnosed with a mental illness. The committees concerns included the safety of participants and the author as the researcher, the authors lack of training and clinical expertise, her disclosure of a past diagnosis of mental illness, the need for provisions to handle any emergencies, and the need to screen potential participants to ensure they were well enough to give informed consent. These paternalistic and medically derived concerns reflect assumptions about mental illness that are challenged by first-person perspectives, social movements in mental health, and newly emerging work within postpsychiatry. The article proposes some ethical procedures for human research ethics committees to follow to counter the epistemological bias of the current ethics review framework, particularly as it serves to constrain qualitative inquiry and first-person perspectives in mental health research.

Risk, expert uncertainty, and Australian news media: public and private faces of expert opinion during the 2009 swine flu pandemic

During the outbreak of emerging infectious diseases scientists and public health officials play a key role in informing communities about what is happening, why and what they can do about it, and the news media are critical to how expert knowledge is presented to the public. Therefore, it is crucial to examine the media-oriented practices of experts and to gauge their perceptions of risk communication during public health emergencies. This study investigates the experiences of scientists and public health officials who were sources for the Australian news media during the 2009 pH1N1 (swine flu) pandemic. The paper discusses the perception among some participants that their colleagues were ‘toeing the party’ line as distinct from offering individual ‘expert opinion’, and identifies the different meanings they associated with responsible expert risk communication. In their encounters with the media some indicated frustration with news media constraints, while others demonstrated an internalization of the kind of skills required to play the ‘media game’. The paper discusses the ways in which scientific experts balanced their roles and responsibilities in the context of institutional pressures to be an active media performer. The study affirms the importance of looking beyond media texts and to the activities and perceptions of media sources in order to fully appreciate framing contests, especially when there is a suggestion that dissenting views on disease risk are restricted from entering public debate.

AIDS assassins : Australian media’s portrayal of HIV-positive refugees who deliberately infect others

The media representations of refugees who are HIV-positive often revolve around criminal transmission cases. This study examines the approach the Australian mass media have taken toward the case of two men from refugee backgrounds and how this stigmatizing language is unhelpful in discussions of HIV. An extensive search of the Factiva database was undertaken for all newspaper articles in the major dailies that mentioned “HIV,” “AIDS,” and “refugee” between 2002 and 2008. Analysis was guided by several approaches to media analysis in an attempt to understand the representations of HIV-positive refugees. When analyzing the media articles of criminal cases relating to HIV we found that refugees who are HIV-positive were portrayed in a negative fashion, with the concept of “otherness” prominent throughout most newspaper media reports. Considering this is the main source of information for most people concerning HIV, this representation carries the potential to lead to further stigma and discrimination to both people living with HIV and refugees.

PUBLIC RESPONSES AND REFLEXIVITY DURING THE SWINE FLU PANDEMIC IN AUSTRALIA

This paper examines key aspects of the Australian publics response to swine flu through an analysis of interviews and focus groups with people deemed “at risk” by medical authorities. The wider context for the study is provided by risk theory, research on public responses to emerging infectious diseases (EID) and the concept of biocommunicability. We focus on reflexivity in engaging with media, views on the governments response, and vigilance and behaviour change. EID fatigue, a predisposition toward distrusting the media, personal circumstances and location within particular social networks, shaped responses to news reporting of swine flu. People did not link swine flu to already stigmatised groups because they identified it as “resident” in the community. The continuing dependency of lay publics upon governments and expert systems may help to explain the lack of criticism directed at more traditionally powerful groups. Distancing took a variety of forms. While newspapers emphasised the “novel” and “deadly” swine flu narrative, audiences readily described it as just another flu and were unconcerned about contracting it. However, some imagined that others were more vulnerable to the effects of media reporting. Some reported searching the internet for information, which may explain the differences between how they saw it and how it was reported. Also influential was the fact that their lived experiences did not bear out the novelty or seriousness of swine flu. Our discussion is informed by our concurrent analyses of media coverage and interviews with EID experts and journalists involved in the reporting.

The unintended consequences of campaigns designed to challenge stigmatising representations of mental illness in the media

The media is widely recognised as contributing to stigma associated with mental illness by portraying it in connection with violence and/or undesirable traits. In response, campaigns directed at policing language use, imagery and story content in the media have been implemented. But these interventions can themselves perpetuate stereotypes and assumptions that ultimately run counter to the original intent of challenging stigma. By way of illustration this paper analyses an Australian campaign that I argue invites people to see stigma in innocuous uses of ordinary language and imagery, effectively associating mental illness with that which it seeks to challenge. The grounds for its criticism and praise of stories about mental illness are also often tenuous and based on a limited approach to determining the impact of story content. The pitfalls of this type of campaign can be avoided by taking heed of the shifts in thinking advocated by postpsychiatry and the deconstructionist strategies employed by activists in the mental health field.

A legacy of the swine flu global pandemic: Journalists, expert sources, and conflicts of interest

This article investigates the extent to which Australian journalists considered the potential conflicts of interest of expert sources during their reporting of the 2009 H1N1 (swine flu) pandemic. The study found that asking about conflicts of interest was not a routine practice for most, though various indirect methods of ascertaining such information were discussed. Journalists’ views and practices in relation to conflicts of interest were shaped by factors related to the story, their sources, audiences, the medium, and personal beliefs. The article elaborates on these findings with reference to key areas of debate relating to conflicts of interest, and considers the extent to which they are products of the context of an emerging infectious disease or characteristic of health reporting more broadly. We conclude that a legacy of the pandemic in Australia appears to be heightened journalistic sensitivity to the conflicts of interest of experts and policy advisors, especially in relation to large-scale public health issues.

‘I’m not clear on what the risk is’: women’s reflexive negotiations of uncertainty about alcohol during pregnancy

Health guidelines in many countries advise women that not drinking alcohol during pregnancy is the safest option for their babies. This advice is based on a lack of evidence about what is a safe amount of alcohol and increasing concern about Foetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorders. While there is some knowledge of factors informing women’s views and practices in relation to alcohol consumption during pregnancy, there is little knowledge or understanding of the ways women interpret and respond to the abstinence public health advice in Australia and its bearing, if any, on their own practices. In this article, we examine women’s experiences of alcohol consumption during pregnancy and their views of the abstinence advice. We locate our analysis within the body of thinking that views pronouncements about risks during pregnancy as bound up with social and cultural values and ideas about what it means to be a ‘good’ or ‘bad’ mother, as much as they are about science. We draw on a study that we undertook in 2014 of 20 women, who were either pregnant, had recently had a child or who had young children, or who were planning for pregnancy, who took part in one-to-one qualitative interviews or participated in focus group discussions in Canberra, Australia. We found that the women in our study variously described receiving reassurance after drinking in early pregnancy; opting to abstain as the safest option in the face of uncertainty; and having an occasional drink if they felt like it. In response to the abstinence advice, we found that some women understood it as a responsible message, even if they had not necessarily adhered to it, while others criticised it as an example of policing pregnant women. Overall, the women in our study accepted that it was possible to drink responsibly during pregnancy and defended this view through strategies of normalising the occasional drink, emphasising a woman’s right to make her own decisions, and associating low-level consumption with low risk.