Feeding Stereotypes

Crime reporters fall into trap of ignorance in portraying suspects, researcher finds

Five varied newspapers sampled Source grows weary

Attend enough psychiatric conferences and spend enough time in the company of mental health advocates, and you will hear a litany of complaints about news media portrayals of mental illness.

It is "sensationalist" "distorted," uninterested in policy and only concerned with "the bizarre and the tragic." "It uses the language of madness casually, incorrectly, and sometimes vituperatively, thus deepening stigma against those who are mentally ill?"

Some, if not all, of this is true and in certain important respects, it is not about to change.

Very often, such complaints reflect an incapacity to see that when a mentally disordered person commits a ghastly crime, then that unusual and worrying event is inevitably going to be reported.

So this was not always a comfortable atmosphere for a journalist to walk into for a year, as I did. Nor was it made any easier when my own study of mainstream American newspapers failed to find pervasive examples of the gross insensitivity, sensationalism, and misreporting which were so often claimed.

Indeed, as a journalist most familiar with norms operating in the British and Australian media, mainstream American news reports involving mental illness strike me as relatively restrained.

However, if this sounds like the beginnings of a ringing endorsement for the way that the American news media report mental illness, it isn't.

Rather, it suggests something subtler: that the relentless framing of mental illness in the context of violence, and criminality, is amplifying, sustaining, and legitimizing a largely false picture of mental ill-health.

This is not a politically correct call to edit out references to mental illness, which is legitimately cited as a material factor in a range of newsworthy crimes and tragedies. However, it is a call for a more conscious appraisal of that materiality on a story -by-story basis, to stop short before adopting mental illness as a catch-all explanation for events which too often appear inexplicable otherwise.

"Many writers quiet the fear that violence arouses by searching for a factor unique to the incident," says an authority on the dynamics of violence for the Institute of Mental Health Initiatives, John B. Livingstone. "Unfortunately, such reassurances are false. They deny the disquieting reality that the factors that contribute to violence are common; their dynamic interaction brings about the violence."

Consider the position in which many seriously mentally ill people find themselves: at the bottom of the socioeconomic heap facing hardship and discrimination. They are often unemployed, uninsured, and under-treated, living in difficult circumstances with family or acquaintances, and subject to some of the most coercive powers of the state.

Many have good reason to feel at least angry or frustrated for reasons which are rooted in, but not caused by, their mental illness.

However, the reality is that most mentally ill people are not violent or dangerous. One of the largest studies ever undertaken into links between mental illness and violence finds no significant correlation unless the mentally ill person is also abusing drugs or alcohol. This finding should come as no surprise, since the same is true of substance abusers who are not mentally ill.

Indeed, people with mental illness are at greater risk of being attacked or of harming themselves than of attacking somebody else. Even when they are the aggressor, attacks on strangers are far rarer than on family and household members.

Yet attacks on strangers, especially random attacks, tend to be judged as more newsworthy than violence within the family, so that one of the dominant images of mentally ill people is that they represent a source of unpredictable, violent risk in the community.

Indeed, perceptions about the mentally ill mirror the "dread and outrage" reaction commonly seen in communities facing feared environmental, industrial, and public health risks.

Unpredictability, potentially catastrophic consequences, a sense of lost control, surprise following inadequate consultation, concerns about equal sharing of risk burdens, and fears for future generations are all common features found in research into the social construction of risk, and its amplification in the news media.

Loss of trust in experts is also commonly seen and, in the case of scientific attempts to predict violence in mentally ill people, such skepticism is arguably justified because the science in this area is still far from robust.

Given factors such as these, reporters also appear to be justified in identifying mental illness as a perceived source of risk and in resisting attempts to substitute traditional news judgments for more scientific methods when deciding whether a risk is newsworthy.

However, that does not negate the challenge for journalists, which lies in recognizing the impacts both on mentally ill people and on mental health policy that flows from treating mental illness as a subset of the daily diet of crime news.

For example, would we be so complacent if any other demonstrably disempowered and stigmatized segment of society were so consistently portrayed as a source of criminal danger? Indeed, could news reporting be said to be one of the most visible forms of what an insanity defense expert at the New York University Law School, professor Michael Perlin, calls "sanism"—a form of discrimination which is "in some ways more troubling (than other -isms) since it is largely invisible and largely socially acceptable.''

At the very least, I suggest that we owe it to mentally ill fellow citizens to be more accurate and sophisticated in our treatment of mental illness, especially if crimes and mental illness are to be even more strongly linked by the trend toward increasing crime coverage.

In fact, perhaps the time has come to make a short course in mental-health medical, legal, and political concepts part of the training of young reporters, in the same way that techniques for reporting police, court, government, and other routine news events are taught.

Following is a suggested bare minimum that all court, police, and city desk reporters and their assigning editors should know about mental ill-health:

• The wide range of different types of mental illness, the enormous variation in their symptoms, and that most are treatable and even curable. Some specific illnesses should be explained in more depth. For example, schizophrenia is not "split personality" but may in fact be several diseases of the brain which are so far very poorly understood and can manifest themselves in a variety of ways;
• The state of research, imprecise as it is, on the links between mental illness and violence, and the apparent importance of substance abuse in that mix, so that reporters will feel challenged to continue seeking explanations for violence beyond the presence of a mental illness;
• The language of mental illness, which can be tricky. For example, "psychopathic'' and "psychotic" have almost opposite meanings but are often confused. The first denotes the coldly calculating selfishness of anti-social personality disorder (where insanity is rarely an issue), while the second suggests such serious impairments to normal thought as hallucinations, delusions, and catatonia. While reporters may resist some of the stigma-neutral terminology preferred by mental health advocates, exposure to the arguments about stigmatizing language might also promote more careful expression;
• The power of the state to deprive mentally ill people of their liberty through involuntary civil commitment laws, the place of voluntary commitment, and the central role of predictions of dangerousness as the standard for both voluntary and involuntary civil commitment;
• Something of the debates that rage within the mental health sector. Organizations such as the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill, which was established by the families of people with mental illness, will at times hold directly opposing views on issues such as coerced hospitalization and drug treatments from psychiatric survivor and anti-institutional mental health advocacy groups. Reporters should also be exposed to the notion that people with a history of mental illness are capable of being reliable sources;
• The huge traffic between prisons and mental hospitals, and the growth in use of mental hospitals as de facto prisons for repeat, violent sex offenders. This so-called "trans-institutionalization" is one of the most vexed issues in criminal justice and mental health policy, particularly as mentally ill people in prison rarely get adequate treatment, let alone get better.

Likewise, a basic introduction to the insanity defense, debate about which has been fundamental in shaping this country's recent mental health politics, should routinely be taught. Reporters should know that:

• Insanity is not a medical term but a legal one, and that the insanity defense is not a form of treatment or judicial compassion, but a legal test of whether the accused had any capacity to understand the alleged crime.
• Insanity acquittees most often spend far longer in mental hospitals than they would have spent in prison.
• Far from being a "designer defense" used by rich people with good attorneys to get themselves off the hook, it is rarely used, is successful in a tiny fraction of cases, and is commonly invoked in cases involving petty crimes committed by people who are so seriously mentally disordered that they had no concept of their guilt.

News values may dictate that we will continue to frame mental illness most commonly in the context of crime, danger, and community fear.

However, if that is so, we should be honest enough to acknowledge that in doing so, we are helping to perpetuate deep-rooted and largely unjustified public attitudes which make the lives of the vast majority of peaceable, de-institutionalized mentally ill people more difficult than they already are.

That being so, we might at least make a commitment to be accurate and searching in our reporting of this exploited and stigmatized range of illnesses.

^*Pattrick Smellie was the 1997-98 Harkness Fellow sponsored by the Commonwealth Fund of New York at the Bazelon Center for Mental Health Law in Washington, D.C. He is the news editor in the Wellington office of the Sunday Star-Times in New Zealand. Mr. Smellie was recently named Newspaper Feature Writer of the Year at the Qantas Media Awards ceremony.

Reproduced with permission from the March/April 1999 issue of QUILL, the magazine of the Society of Professional Journalists.