Raymond Nairn

Depictions of mental illness in print media: a prospective national sample.

Objective: Because there are no published reports of depictions of mental illness in print media based on national samples, we set out to prospectively collect and analyse a near complete New Zealand sample of print media. Methods: A commercial clipping bureau was contracted to provide cuttings of all items with any mental health or illness aspect over a four week period. These items were analysed for potentially positive and negative depictions and how mental illness was represented within each item. An independent search for additional newspaper items concerning one prominently featured topic indicated that the rate of identification of relevant stories was at least 91%. Result: The collection consisted of six hundred print items which were most commonly news or editorial pieces (n = 562, 93.7%). Negative depictions predominated, with dangerousness to others (n = 368, 61.3%) and criminality (n = 284, 47.3%) being the most common. Positive depictions, including human rights themes, leadership and educational accomplishments occurred in 27% (n = 164) of all items. Generic mental illness terminology without reference to specific diagnostic categories was present in 47% of all items (n = 284). Conclusions: Negative depictions that predominate confirm the stereotypic understanding of mental illness that is stigmatizing. These findings underscore the challenge facing us as mental health professionals attempting to change attitudes towards mental disorders when the stereotypes are so regularly reinforced.

Media Depictions of Mental Illness: An Analysis of the Use of Dangerousness

Objective: To explore how the commonsense understanding, that those with a mental illness are dangerous, is deployed in a small sample of print media. Method: The print media sample was subjected to a discourse analysis informed by knowledge of media practices. Materials were read closely and references to mental illness were identified, classified and analysed. Results: This non-sensational material was shown to provide repeated confirmations of the commonsense understanding that mental illnesses make people unpredictable and dangerous. Close study of the lead article suggested that it was written so that readers had to draw on such understandings to make sense of the account it presented. Conclusion: The study challenges the notion that media present negative depictions of mental illnesses either because journalists are poorly informed or because ‘sensation sells’. It is concluded that media practices directed at engaging readers require the use of cases and a style of writing that forces readers to draw upon commonsense knowledge of mental illness to understand the text. It is argued that this is a deliberate effort to enlist readers as co-creators of the text and thereby increase their interest.

Mental illness depictions in prime‐time drama: identifying the discursive resources

Objective: The aim of this study was to determine how the mentally ill are depicted in prime-time television dramas. Method: Fourteen television dramas that included at least one character with a mental illness, shown in prime-time during a 1-year period, were systematically viewed and analysed. Results: Fifteen of the 20 mentally ill characters were depicted as physically violent toward self or others. Characters were also depicted negatively as simple or lacking in comprehension and appearing lost, unpredictable, unproductive, asocial, vulnerable, dangerous to self or others because of incompetent behaviours, untrustworthy, and social outcasts, and positively as caring or empathic. Conclusions: These data are consistent with an overwhelming negativity of depictions of the mentally ill found in other forms of media and settings, and contribute to the stigmatisation of this population.

Race Talk and Common Sense: Patterns in Pakeha Discourse on Maori/Pakeha Relations in New Zealand

Discourse analysis of public submissions arising from an overt racial conflict in New Zealand in 1979 has yielded a number of patterns in the talk of Pakeha New Zealanders. An outline of two such patterns is presented and these are then drawn upon in the deconstruction of a piece of contemporary Pakeha discourse. This analysis is designed to shed some light on the significance of the patterns presented; their durability, their function, and their contribution to the apparent success of the sample discourse and their role in a broader Pakeha ideology of Maori/Pakeha relations in Aotearoa (New Zealand).

People never see us living well: an appraisal of the personal stories about mental illness in a prospective print media sample

OBJECTIVE Having found no discussions of self-depictions offered by psychiatric patients in the mass media we sought such items in a prospective national sample of print media and analysed how those speakers portrayed themselves. METHOD As part of a larger study of media depictions of mental illnesses in print media all items with any mental health or illness aspect that appeared in a New Zealand publication over a four-week period were collected. The resulting collection of 600 items ranged from news briefs to full-page newspaper articles. From that set we selected and analysed items in which a person identified as having been a psychiatric patient or as having a mental disorder was either quoted by the reporter who had interviewed them, or personally described their experiences. Employing both propositional analyses and discourse analysis we explored how the speakers were positioned and identified patterns or themes in their construction of living with a mental illness. RESULTS Only five articles (0.8%) met our criteria for a person with a mental disorder being reported directly. In those items the journalists had positioned the speakers as credible, expert sources who, in representing their lives and experiences, drew on five clusters of resources, that we titled: Ordinariness/Living Well; Vulnerability; Stigma; Crisis; and Disorder/Treatment. Ordinariness/Living Well foregrounded the role of personal strengths in living well and in overcoming adversity, particularly that associated with being stigmatized. We identified that theme as central to the ways in which these speakers depicted themselves as recognizably human and understandable. CONCLUSION The findings are preliminary but these depictions are different from those reported by most researchers. Unlike those depictions, these speakers provided accessible and recognizably human self-portrayals. That finding intensifies our concern that most researchers appear to be unaware that these consumer voices are largely absent from mass media depictions of mental illnesses.

From Source Material to News Story in New Zealand Print Media: A Prospective Study of the Stigmatizing Processes in Depicting Mental Illness

Objective: The aim of this study was to analyse how newspaper articles that depict mental illnesses are generated from source materials. Method: From a prospectively collected national sample of print materials involving mental illness, 50 published items that related to the Privacy Commissioners opinion about disclosure of a psychiatric patients health information were identified. A copy of the Privacy Commissioners original Case Note and three news stories about the Case Note distributed by the New Zealand Press Association constituted the database. These materials were subjected to discourse analysis. We identified themes and their transformation from the Case Note through the news stories and examined the impact of these transformations on the stigmatization of mental illness. Results: Four themes were identified: human rights, vulnerability, risk of dangerousness and threat, and mental illness/psychiatric patient. The only potentially positive theme, human rights, was limited both by being fragmented in the source material, and by being utilized, in the published news stories to undermine the legitimacy of the patients right to privacy. Use of the other themes was consistent with stereotypes about mental illness. Conclusions: Although there were no inaccuracies in the content of the news stories they were substantially more negative than the source material in their depiction of the identified patient. A potentially positive discourse (human rights) was not by itself sufficient to ensure a positive portrayal of mental illness. An understanding of the transformations is important for efforts to effectively combat the stigmatization of those with mental illness.

Constructing mental illness as dangerous: A pilot study

Objective: There is a dearth of studies examining how dangerousness is constructed in media depictions of mentally ill individuals who are frequently portrayed as acting violently. The aim of the present study was to identify the contribution of diverse technical, semiotic and discursive resources utilised in portraying a character with a mental illness in a prime-time drama as dangerous. Method: Discourse analytic techniques, involving systematic, repeated, critical viewings, were applied to a single program drawn from a sample of prime-time television drama episodes touching on mental illness. Results: Nine devices (appearance, music and sound effects, lighting, language, intercutting, jump-cutting, point of view shots, horror conventions and intertextuality) were identified as contributing to the signified dangerousness of person receiving care in the community for a mental illness. Conclusions: These techniques combine in signifying mental illness and a person suffering from it as dangerous. The findings suggest that mental health professionals working to reduce the stigma of mental illness need to have a reasonably sophisticated understanding of the practices and priorities of television production if they are to collaborate effectively with producers to create dramas that convey more human and sympathetic understandings of mental illness or to combat the negative effects of such portrayals.

Media, Racism and Public Health Psychology

International literature has established that racism contributes to ill-health of migrants, ethnic minorities and indigenous peoples. Racism generally negates wellbeing, adversely affecting physical and psychological health. Numerous studies have shown that media contribute marginalizing particular ethnic and cultural groups depicting them primarily as problems for and threats to the dominant. This articles frames media representations of, and their effect on, the indigenous Maori of Aotearoa, New Zealand within the ongoing processes of colonization. We argue that reflects the media contribution to maintenance and naturalisation of colonial relationships and seek to include critical media scholarship in a critical public health psychology.

Insensitivity and Hypersensitivity: An Imbalance in Pakeha Accounts of Racial Conflict

In a plural society, the manner in which issues of race or ethnic relations are conceptualised is of considerable importance. So too are the processes by which such linguistic constructions are analysed. This article presents a detailed account of the analysis of one pattern observed in our analysis of submissions made to the Human Rights Commission (HRC) in 1979. The submission writers were explicitly asked to account for a physical confrontation between a group of Auckland University students performing a caricature of a Maori haka and a group of young Polynesians who objected to their performance. Sensitivity and related terms were used by 36 writers to accomplish various goals, particularly in attributing blame for the incident. The article describes the patterns of use and how they function for the writer.

Tauiwi1 General Practitioners’ Explanations of Maori2 Health: Colonial Relations in Primary Healthcare in Aotearoa/New Zealand?

This article reports initial findings from qualitative research investigating how general practitioners talk about Maori health. Transcripts of semistructured interviews with 25 general practitioners from urban Auckland were subjected to critical discursive analyses. Through this process of intensive, analytic reading, interpretative repertoires—patterns of words and images about a particular topic—were identified. This article presents the main features of one such repertoire, termed Maori Morbidity, that the general practitioners used in accounting for poor Maori health status. Our participants were drawing upon a circumscribed pool of ideas and explaining the inequalities in health between Maori and Tauiwi in ways that gave primacy to characteristics of Maori and their culture. We discuss the implications of this conclusion for relations between Maori patients and Tauiwi doctors in primary healthcare settings.