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Consumer/Survivor Information
Challenging Stereotypes: An Action Guide
Introduction
Recovery from mental illness is a complex
process. As with all serious illness, the
well-being of recovering individuals is
affected by the attitudes that surround them.
Despite increasing sensitivity about most disabilities,
mental illness all too often remains a target
for ridicule and misrepresentation in advertising,
entertainment, and the mainstream media.
Most of what we know as individuals comes not
from personal experience, but from the stories
that surround us from birth. In the past it was
families, religious institutions, schools, and
respected members of the community who
instilled cultural attitudes. “Today, this is done
by the mass media,” says George Gerbner,
founder of the Cultural Environment Movement,
and a researcher whose career includes 30 years
of monitoring the cultural impact of television
on society.
Television is, in Gerbner’s words, “the wholesale
distributor of the stigma of mental illness.” His
research has shown that characters portrayed
on television as having mental illnesses have
four times the violence rate and six times the
victimization rate of other characters. Gerbner
notes that “Violence and retribution are shown
as inherent in the illness itself and thus
inescapable. No other group in the dramatic
world of television suffers and is shown to
deserve such a dire fate.”1
The portrayal of mental illness in the movies is
similarly distorted. In the late 1980s, Steven E.
Hyler of Columbia University and his colleagues
identified six categories of psychiatric characters
in films: homicidal maniac, narcissistic parasite,
seductress, enlightened member of society, rebellious
free spirit, and zoo specimen. Hyler concluded that
these predominantly negative stereotypes
had a damaging effect on the viewing public
and on the patients themselves, their family
members, and policy makers.2 More recently,
Otto F. Wahl of George Mason University, an authority
on public images of mental illness, found that in
the decade from 1985 to 1995, Hollywood
released more than 150 films with characters who
have mental illnesses, the majority of them
killers and villains.3
There can be no doubt that
Hollywood stereotypes are a large part of what
people know, or think they know, about people
with psychiatric vulnerabilities.
Newspaper reports about mental illness are
often more accurate than the characters one
sees in TV entertainment and movies. Still, people
with psychiatric histories generally are
reported negatively. In 1991, researchers Russell
E. Shain and Julie Phillips, using the United
Press International database from 1983, found
that 86 percent of all print stories dealing with
former mental patients focused on violent
crime.4 A 1997 British study found similarly
skewed stories,5 and a 1999 German study (to be
published) concludes that selective reporting
about mental illness causes audiences to distort
their view of the “real world.”
6
Media stereotypes of persons with mental illness
as villains, failures, buffoons — together with
the misuse of terms like “schizophrenia” and
“psychotic” in negative contexts — have far-reaching
consequences. On the most deeply
personal level, biased stereotypes damage the
sense of self-worth of millions of persons diagnosed
with serious psychiatric illnesses. On the
social and economic levels, negative stereotyping
may result in large-scale discrimination
against an entire class of people in the areas of
housing, employment, health insurance, and
medical treatment.
Increasingly, the media are doing better work;
at times, their efforts are excellent. Diana Ross’s
moving and realistic portrayal of schizophrenia
in Out of Darkness, an ABC television drama7,
was praised by mental health activists. “Good”
characters with mental illness are appearing
from time to time in prime-time television
entertainment. In an outstanding documentary
for Dateline NBC, John Hockenberry followed for
two years the uneven course of recovery of a
young man with schizophrenia8.
Feature stories about the achievements of individuals
diagnosed with mental illness — such as
Newsweek’s account of Tom Harrell,9 a jazz
trumpet
star; The San Diego Union-Tribune’s account
of pro golfer Muffin Spencer-Devlin;10 and
a New
York Times business section feature about John
Forbes Nash, Jr., the winner of a Nobel Prize for
economics11
— also help shatter stereotypes. A
New York Times Magazine cover story, for example,
brought new understanding to a highly publicized
homicide when it chronicled a young
man’s search for help in a crumbling mental
health system.12
And increasingly, people with first-hand experience
of mental illness are writing books, appearing
on television news and talk shows,
producing documentaries and radio programs,
and contributing articles to the print media.
The disparity between mental illness as it is perceived
by much of the public and mental illness
as it is lived and experienced is a gulf to be
bridged. In his 1999 landmark report to the
Nation on mental illness and health, Surgeon
General David Satcher called on America to tear
down the barriers of prejudice that block access
to services and recovery.13
Nothing short of a
national commitment to de-stigmatize mental
illness will achieve this goal.
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