After a person receiving treatment escaped from a psychiatric hospital on Sunday evening, messages spreading fear and myths about people with mental health problems were soon found in the media. The incident, which lasted less than an hour, managed to become a sensation.
A challenge for journalism: mental health and unprofessionalism
After a person receiving treatment escaped from a psychiatric hospital on Sunday evening, messages spreading fear and myths about people with mental health problems were soon found in the media. The incident, which lasted less than an hour, managed to become a sensation.
And although both sensational headlines and illustrations of knife blades were used to enhance the impression, this just demonstrated the standard case of how for more than a decade Lithuanian journalists use the state of one’s mental health as an element of critical danger, and, deliberately or not, hide their financial interest in the name of public interest. We invite you to get to know how the Lithuanian media reacted to the outcome of the event this time.
Media researcher G. Gerbner has pointed out the financial interest when analyzing the portrayal of people with mental disorders: “The number of sales is greatly increased by the description of insanity or unpredictable, unexpected, bloody murder.”
Also emphasizing that consuming such elements has a detrimental effect on public perception. When respondents were asked to describe people with mental health problems, the most commonly used words were: mass murderers, terrorists, hired assassins, future assassins of top officials.
According to a 2006 Eurobarometer survey, Lithuanians stand out from other European countries as the ones that fear people with mental health problems the most. As many as 68 percent of Lithuanians believe that people with mental illnesses are dangerous. Meanwhile, statistics show that such people committed only 4 percent of all crimes and less than 1 percent of all violent crimes in Lithuania. They are much more likely to be victims of crime themselves.
Knowing that 1/4 of the population has a mental health problem at least once in their life, we can only imagine how much this affects them. According to a public opinion survey commissioned by the Institute for Ethnic Studies in 2020, they remain in the third place among the most undesirable neighbors and first among undesirable colleagues.
“Dangerous,” “armed with a kitchen knife,” – these are one of the most common epithets describing the person who escaped from a psychiatric hospital this Sunday, testifying to how deeply ingrained the myth of people with mental health problems and their riskiness is.
It soon became clear that this person was not running away from the police, nor was he resisting it or trying to use a knife. Moreover, the wanted person had not had any violent past. The only reason to consider him dangerous was that he had tools that could be used as weapons.
How did journalists react to newly disclosed facts?
News portal Tv3.lt changed their headlines of the article several times, but stuck with the version using a mocking tone and encouraging stereotypes: “New details after the psychiatric patient chase: he came to the supermarket “Maxima” in pajamas”, but after reading the information presented you can see that there was no chase, and the patient, whose whereabouts were reported, did not resist the police officers.
Four news portals (Lrt.lt, tv3.lt, 15min.lt ir Kas vyksta Kaune) write that no one was harmed, but after reading the other articles, it becomes clear that there was probably no threat of harm in the first place.
All news portals identified the patient as dangerous, but only in three (Alfa.lt, Lrytas.lt and Delfi) the information was updated with the previously mentioned details of the event. Despite the updated information provided, which shows the patient’s calm reaction to the officers, harmful and misleading headlines remained published.
G. Gerbner calls the phenomenon of depicting mental illness “forced disinformation”. According to him, the depiction of mental illness has developed one of the most damaging images of society. Until the portrayal of people with mental health problems changes, even the best and most successful campaigns will not reduce stigma and fear of mental illness.
What has an impact on our views?
There is a correlation between how the group is portrayed in the media and society’s attitudes towards the group.
“Thanks to the work of journalists, the facts or interpretations of social reality become universal knowledge, and knowledge becomes a self-evident reality. The image of the most stigmatized groups is the result of social construction, which is not explained only by the characteristics of the group,” said Neringa Jurčiukonytė, Head of Media4Change.
Mental health experts have repeatedly emphasized that the media can contribute to the process of breaking down myths and destigmatizing by avoiding extreme images and increasing the visibility of these people in the Lithuanian media.
Still, Media4Change’s 2019 media monitoring results show that less than 3 percent of publications about mental health involve the users of mental health services themselves as a source. Only three people with mental disorders were interviewed in December of 2019, although 121 publications on mental health were published.
This is not the first time that Media4Change analysts have observed such tendencies in Lithuanian media. And although there has been a considerable improvement in the situation in 2020 (twice as many journalistic works on mental health, which include mental health service users themselves as a source), the situation has not changed substantially. The media still echoes the long-standing “moral panic” of criminologists, with all its negative consequences for both people with mental disorders and society as a whole.
