Media & Mental Health

Introduction: The Problem Can Be a Solution

In March 2018, professional basketball player Kevin Love, an All Star power forward for the Cleveland Cavaliers, made an admission on the social media platform Twitter. He never felt comfortable sharing personal information, he told followers, and he previously considered mental health someone else’s problem. “I’ve realized I need to change that,” he wrote, sharing an essay he wrote for The Players’ Tribune titled “Everyone is going through something” (Love, 2018).

The essay, which would propel Love into an unofficial role of mental health spokesman for the National Basketball Association, started by informing readers that he experienced a panic attack in the middle of a basketball game. In 2,500 words, Love walked fans through his experiences with depression and anxiety, the stigmatization of mental health among professional athletes, and how he was inspired to come forward after reading a similar disclosure by fellow NBA star DeMar DeRozan. DeRozan, an All Star for the Toronto Raptors, had written on Twitter, “This depression get the best of me” (DeRozan, 2018), quoting the lyrics of a rap song and generating instant support from the Toronto fanbase.

“Just by sharing what he shared,” Love wrote, “DeMar probably helped some people — and maybe a lot more people than we know — feel like they aren’t crazy or weird to be struggling with depression. His comments helped take some ←1 | 2→power away from stigma, and I think that’s where the hope is” (Love, 2018, para. 28).

The hope.

Hope might not readily come to mind when one surveys the landscape of mental health in the United States, where people often cannot afford care or find treatment professionals whose calendars bear open slots (e.g., Caron, 2021), and where mental illness remains stigmatized in many communities. Against this backdrop, the disclosure from professional athletes that they, too, at times questioned their worth, struggled with emotional ups and downs, and felt as though they did not belong represented an important moment. Love and DeRozan used the mass media—in this case, social media and an industry magazine—to inspire others to take an initial step toward mental health by talking, sharing, and discussing.

More than 49,000 users retweeted Love’s initial post, and the tweet went on to generate international news coverage, disclosures from professional athletes in soccer, football, and other sports, and comments from fans. Since Love’s essay appeared in the Tribune, the publication has devoted an entire section to mental health. It features more than two dozen essays by elite athletes who share their experiences with substance abuse, depression, anxiety, obsessive compulsive disorder, and other mental health conditions (The Players’ Tribune, 2022). In addition to inspiring athletes, Love and DeRozan prompted disclosures from fans (Parrott et al., 2020). As one person wrote Love on Twitter, “I might actually go to a counselor now because of this.” Another wrote, “Thank you for being a real man and talking about this openly. I am a real man too … its (sic) time the stigma stops!”

The growing number of celebrity disclosures may signal an approaching sea change in mass media representations of mental illness. Since the early days of television, people have been concerned about how the mass media represent the subject of mental illness and the people who experience depression, anxiety, schizophrenia, and other disorders. George Gerbner, an influential mass communication researcher, spent time in the 1950s interviewing Hollywood censors to see how they handled the subject of mental illness (Gerbner, 1959). Script writers, he learned, often turned to mental illness when they needed to explain the unexplainable or attribute blame to quickly wrap up mysteries in the condensed format of American television. Censors described themselves as the final barrier blocking writers and producers from bombarding the television-viewing public with exploitive images of mental illness. As one censor put it, “We’re holding the line.” Another declared, “We are the conscience of the industry” (Gerbner, 1959, ←2 | 3→p. 294). Gerbner concluded that “Some ‘gatekeepers’ go to (and even beyond) the limits of the public relations functions delegated to them in striving for what they consider responsible portrayals. But the methods of censorship are hardly adequate to the task” (p. 303). Indeed, it appears the lines did not hold.

←3 | 4→In addition to shaping attitudes, media messages guide conversations. To illustrate, a research team in the United States found that online news readers expressed stigmatizing comments when they encountered stories in which people with schizophrenia perpetrated violence (Gwarjanski & Parrott, 2018). “People with psychiatric and/or substance abuse problems should have mandatory treatment and should not be allowed to roam the streets, even if they’re not hurting anyone,” one reader wrote beneath an online news article. “It’s a disgrace.”

We see, then, that the concerns expressed by Gerbner’s censors in the 1950s lingered into the 1980s, 1990s, 2000s, and modern day, carrying with them the potential for problematic outcomes. Thus, when professional athletes and other successful, popular, and respected people came out via the mass media and said, “I have a mental illness,” people listened. People responded.

For some fans, the disclosures represented an impetus for openly talking about mental health, while for others the comments nurtured the desire to seek treatment (Parrott et al., 2020). For scholars, the resulting news coverage and conversations raised questions: At what point do we shift our research focus? At what point do we use research theory and methods to illustrate (and accentuate) the positive effects of mass media exposure on mental health and stigma? At what point do we train our focus toward the positive, the hope Love referenced?

Scientific inquiry should remain objective, and in the area of media studies, scholars should employ sound methodological and theoretical approaches to understanding media content and its effect on individuals and society. Training our scholarly attention toward the potential for positive social change does not represent advocacy. A growing number of researchers are using social scientific approaches to understand how the mass media might have positive effects, rather than negative, on public understanding and appreciation of mental health.

This book seeks to provide readers understanding of the research to date with the hope that it might spark ideas for inquiry, interventions, public relations campaigns, and other “positive” pursuits related to media and stigma. The book combines research in media psychology, social psychology, journalism, public relations, and other fields to better understand how media channels can be used to challenge the stigmatization of mental illness, a social issue that touches everything from politics to prison, education to employment.

Chapter 1 introduces readers to the concept of stigmatization, examining how people have defined the term from the time of ancient Greece, when stigma represented a mark that indicated one’s status as a social outcast, to the predominant modern conceptualization in which stigma represents a process of stereotyping, prejudice, and discrimination that occurs within environments of power. ←4 | 5→The chapter also discusses research concerning the stigmatization of mental illness in particular.