Mitigating the impact of the media on stigmatising attitudes towards people with complex mental illness

Project Details

Stigma towards people with complex mental illnesses, such as schizophrenia, psychosis and bipolar disorder, is a critical issue. It adversely impacts life satisfaction, help-seeking, treatment engagement and overall recovery. Key drivers of stigma include news portrayals that link severe mental illness to violence. These are overrepresented compared to positively-framed portrayals, influencing public beliefs about dangerousness and unpredictability. Addressing media-based stigma is a national health priority. Targeting stigma reduction interventions to media professionals and students presents a substantial opportunity to reduce stigma on a widespread scale.

This program aims to advance world-first interventions to shift media practice for reporting on mental illness in the context of crime, which is critical to reducing stigma towards people with complex mental illness. This project will generate new knowledge on how to improve media reporting of mental illness, specifically aiming to:

1. Evaluate an education intervention with journalism students, based on my recent evidence-based guidelines for best-practice reporting of mental illness, violence and crime, using a cluster RCT design.
2. Co-design and trial an online training package targeting media professionals.
3. Determine the reach and adoption of the media guidelines.
4. Investigate the impact of the guidelines on news portrayals of mental illness by analysing the content of Australian news reports.

The findings will inform a national implementation strategy to reduce stigmatising content in news portrayals, subsequently reducing stigma on a significant scale and playing a key role in improving social inclusion and recovery for people with mental illness.

Researchers

Dr Anna Ross (Project Lead)
anross@unimelb.edu.au
+61 3 8344 7888

Funding

NHMRC Investigator Grant (EL1)