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.


METHODS
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.


CONCLUSIONS
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.
Nairn
R G
RG
School of Population Health, Faculty of Medical and Health Sciences, University of Auckland, Private Bag 92019, Auckland, New Zealand. r.nairn@auckland.ac.nz
Coverdale
J H
JH
D000328:Adult; D005239:Fear; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D008402:Mass Media; D001523:Mental Disorders / Q000523:psychology*; D033262:Narration; D011287:Prejudice; D011446:Prospective Studies; D011643:Publishing; D013240:Stereotyping; D013313:Stress Disorders, Post-Traumatic / Q000523:psychology; D017741:Survivors / Q000523:psychology