Mental Health Stereotypes

include those with a mental illness, their friends and family, policymakers, health care providers and leaders in the community. In many cultures across the world people who ask for help are seen as weak. For this reason many people who may have psychological issues will not get the professional help that they need. This stigma continues to affect people and their mental wellbeing. As mentioned before media is the main way we get information about a lot of topics; this could mean through the news, movies, television or social media. In entrainment media there are a lot of shows that have characters that portray someone with a mental health issue or someone as a mental health professional. These characters are usually exaggerated and far
In Australia, mental health awareness efforts have been focused on more common illness like depression and they have encouraged people who lived with depression to share their experiences with mental health services through mass media. The media has been known to highlight negative stereotypes about people with mental health disorders; they would often be view as violent and dangerous. We often see these depictions for adults with mental health illness but there is very little research on the portrayals in the media of children and adolescents with mental health illness. A study done by Connie Henson, Simon Chapman, Lachlan McLeod, Natalie Johnson, Ian Hickie, titled “Room for improvement: mixed portrayal of young people with mental illness on Australian television news” (2009) focuses on the media’s portrayal of children and adolescences with mental health disorders. They collected television news articles from the University of Sydney’s Australian Health News Research Collaboration database. There was a mix view of youth with mental illness found in this study. It was evenly split between positive, neutral and negative news angles (Henson, 2009). This could be due to the fact that Australia is working against the stigma around people with mental health issues by
We also see that those reporting stories are insensitive and undertrained to interview those who have been through a trauma. Lastly we see that the reporting of suicides or familicide-suicide in detail can be harmful to the community as well as family and friends of the deceased. With all this being portrayed in the media this cause a stigma around those living with mental health issues and this puts pressure on them to stay away from seeking help because of the fear of being