engleski

Mental illness and aggression in the printed media : is there a link. A Central European perspective

Media are considered to be the public’s primary source of information regarding mental health/illness. It has been documented that mass media representations of people with mental illness tend to emphasize violence, dangerousness and criminality. Our goal was to investigate depiction of mental illness in the printed media in the Czech and Slovak Republic with special emphasis on aggressive behavior associated with persons with mental illness and what type of aggressive act is mostly portrayed. Study sample comprised articles pertaining to the topic of mental illness chosen from the six most widely read printed daily newspapers and six most widely read magazines in both countries. Articles were further analyzed according to the coding manual developed for the purpose of this study. Its development was based on the theoretical framework of content analysis. Each article was coded by three researchers thus allowing us analysis of inter-coder reliability. One third (31, 2%) of all analyzed articles reported mentally ill persons involved in some kind of aggressive behavior. Vast majority of those presented mentally ill as perpetrators (71.8%). In 19 articles (16.2%) they were presented as victims of aggressive behavior, while in 14 articles (11.9 %) they were placed in the role of both victim and perpetrator at the same time. In articles depicting aggressive behavior persons with psychosis were most frequently presented as perpetrators (50.0%), while persons with organic disorders such as dementia were more often presented as victims of aggressive behavior (12.5%). The rest of the analyzed articles (68.8%), contained no information that mentally ill person was involved in aggressive behavior.

mental illness; stigma; print media; aggression

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