Breaking Stigma: Media’s Role in Mental Health

The media’s representation of mental illness has a long history, and it has evolved significantly over the years. A study in 2019 published in Front Psychiatry in the National Center for Biotechnology Information states that despite proliferation of many mental health apps there has been no “equivalent proliferation of scientific evidence for their effectiveness.” It considered the roles of technologies in mental health, particularly in public education; patient screening; treatment; training and supervision; and system improvement. Mindfulness based online intervention has been shown to have small to moderate benefits on mental health. Digital technologies have also provided opportunities for delivery of mental health care online; benefits have been found with computerized cognitive behavioral therapy for depression and anxiety. This included the attorneys general of 33 states filing a combined lawsuit over concerns about the addictive nature of Instagram and its impact on the mental health of young people.

• The Lexis Nexis Professional UK electronic newspaper database was used to search articles from 27 local and national newspapers which were published on two randomly chosen days each month, and which referred to mental illness.
• As shown in the graph, negative media representation can contribute to stigma, creating barriers to care, while positive representation can reduce stigma, increasing help-seeking behavior.
• Coverage of recovery from and successful treatment of mental health problems has been as little as 4% of mental health articles (Thornicroft et al., Reference Thornicroft, Goulden, Shefer, Rhydderch, Rose, Williams, Thornicroft and Henderson2013).
• Anxiety disorders in children and adolescents are commonly treated with SSRIs, which are both safe and effective for generalized anxiety disorder (GAD), social anxiety disorder, and separation anxiety disorder .
• While in the USA and Australia, which do not have a National Health Service, there were several articles concerning issues of medical health insurance, this was never mentioned in the UK media.

Promoting Nuanced and Accurate Representation

CBT demonstrates significant efficacy in treating compulsive internet use, anxiety disorders, and self-esteem issues. For anxiety disorders, Carpenter et al. (2018) conducted a meta-analysis of randomized placebo-controlled trials and found that CBT consistently reduced symptoms across various anxiety-related conditions. Future research should focus on developing more effective intervention strategies to protect adolescents in online spaces while promoting digital literacy and resilience-building measures Addressing these challenges requires a multi-pronged approach that includes improved regulatory policies, better AI-driven content moderation, increased parental and educator involvement, and enhanced mental health support for victims. The persistent and public nature of online harassment differentiates it from traditional bullying, as the audience is potentially unlimited, leading to increased humiliation and long-lasting emotional scars . Cyberbullying has increased significantly in recent years, emerging as a major contributor to deteriorating mental health in adolescents.

Dopamine dysregulation has a major impact on ADHD symptoms in digital environments, altering brain areas involved in impulse control, decision-making, and reward processing . This dysregulation leads to ADHD patients having difficulty in executing reinforcement learning, particularly when it comes to error processing and reward anticipation. Furthermore, excessive screen time, particularly with intense and fast-paced content, has been linked to ADHD-related behaviors through dopamine and reward circuit activation .

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Other experts, cited in a 2017 UNICEF Office of Research literature review, have recommended addressing potential underlying problems rather than arbitrarily enforcing screen time limits. The American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) has developed a Family Media Plan, intending to help parents assess and structure their family’s use of electronic devices and media more safely. Mental Health Podcast RSS Feed Sedentary behavior, especially when combined with poor diet habits during screen time, increases the risk of long-term health complications. A 2018 review found that while the literature is sparse and inconclusive, overall, heavy media multitaskers also have poorer performance in several cognitive domains. A different perspective in 2018 by Musetti and colleagues reappraised the internet in terms of its necessity and ubiquity in modern society, as a social environment, rather than a tool, thereby calling for the reformulation of the internet addiction model. Concerns have been raised by Aarseth and colleagues over this inclusion, particularly in regard to stigmatization of heavy gamers.

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“Men normally show quite high levels of cortisol, so it might be that they just can’t go any higher,” says Marie-France Marin, a psychologist at the University of Quebec in Montreal, who authored the study. Ironically, these people did have the worst psychological outcomes in the end – but Thompson thinks this is partly because of the amount of stressful information they were exposed to. For example, those who thought they were more likely to develop post-traumatic stress after Hurricane Irma made its way across Florida in September 2017, also tended to consume the most news in the run up to it. This leads us into the trap of overloading on news. Thompson explains that right now many people are likely to be fixated on their future distress. A classic 1978 study compared the happiness of those who had recently had their lives transformed by winning the lottery or becoming paralysed.

Proximal and intermediate changes were reported by studies evaluating the media mental health campaigns focusing on depression, anxiety, self-harm, and/or suicide. This systematic review presents the impacts of media mental health campaigns, more specifically around anxiety, depression, self-harm, and suicide, on young people. This review included media campaigns directed toward young people focusing on emotional disorders such as depression and anxiety, self-harm, and/or suicide and presented favorable impacts on their attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors. Future campaign evaluations may benefit from comparing the effectiveness of previous efforts across media types (e.g., television, print advertisements, and online social media) to identify which platforms might generate a greater effect. Future media mental health campaigns should identify and focus on groups where mental health stigma is most prevalent and involve these individuals in the design and implementation processes to foster more authentic and impactful mental health promotion strategies. In many Eastern countries, mental health disorders are considered a taboo, where it is shameful to discuss the topic with others, and there is a lack of resources (Madina & Ahmad, 2023).

This study aims to assess the way that coverage of mental health topics and different mental illnesses has changed since 2008. The pattern of stigmatising coverage in different diagnostic groups is consistent with previous research on public perceptions of various mental illnesses were often judged by the public as more ‘serious’ and often linked with more negative stereotypes and viewed as more dangerous and less likely to recover in comparison to CMDs . The findings of this study imply that Time to Change has had positive effects in reducing stigma as shown in previous newspaper analyses as well as findings from a general population survey 29, 36 and a survey of people using mental health services . Articles analysed in the present study are from UK national newspapers that were published immediately before and over the course of three phases of the TTC anti-stigma programme (from 2008 to 2019). In terms of the illness diagnosis, articles featuring SMI have 1.72 times higher odds of being stigmatising compared with articles featuring CMD after adjusting for year of publication (95% CI 1.39–2.13, detailed presented in Table 2). Proportion of articles that are stigmatising, anti-stigmatising, and neutral or mixed by diagnosis and newspaper type from 2008 to 2019