"How Dark a World It Is … Where Mental Health Is Poorly Treated": Mental Illness Frames in Sermons Given After the Sandy Hook Shootings.
In the aftermath of the Newtown, CT, massacre, the United States is engaging in public deliberations that will reshape future mental healthcare policies, practices, and systems. We know little about the clergy's contributions to these deliberations. Clergy, as with psychiatrists and mental health specialists, are members of the helping professions and are regarded as front-line mental health workers and gatekeepers to mental health services. To consider clergy contributions, we drew on Entman's framing perspective to study sermons given in the state of Connecticut after the Sandy Hook shootings. We examined 73 posted full-text sermons and performed the constant comparative method on 20 that made references to mental illness. We discovered clergy used "social support" and "social system" frames. Upon developing these frames, we discuss the study's contributions by considering clergy silence, their use of frames to delineate between the secular and the spiritual, their mitigation and promotion of mental illness stigma, and their incomplete social system frame.
a Department of Communication , University of Oklahoma.
James O
JO
Olufowote
b Nicholson School of Communication , University of Central Florida.
Jonathan
J
Matusitz
D002977:Clergy; D003142:Communication; D003415:Crime; D005389:Firearms; D006801:Humans; D001523:Mental Disorders / Q000523:psychology; D008603:Mental Health; D012574:Schools; D057545:Social Stigma; D012944:Social Support; D014481:United States; D014947:Wounds and Injuries / Q000401:mortality*