Constructing Madness: Media Narratives and Public Understandings of Mental Illness in Contemporary Ghana, c. 2000–2025

This article examines how Ghanaian news media reflect public understandings of mental illness during a period of growing media visibility and partial mental health reform. Drawing on Stuart Hall’s constructionist theory of representation and insights from the health humanities, it argues that news media in Ghana do not simply report on mental illness but function as a stabilizing narrative space through which meanings about danger, morality, spirituality, and disorder are produced and sustained. Rather than reshaping public attitudes in line with reforms such as the Mental Health Act of 2012, media representations often absorb biomedical and rights-based language into longstanding moral and spiritual frameworks. Using qualitative interpretive analysis of selected media coverage, this article demonstrates how persistent narrative frames shape public understandings of mental illness in Ghana. It argues that despite institutional reforms, media representations continue to embed biomedical discourse within longstanding moral and spiritual interpretations, thereby limiting the transformative impact of policy change. By approaching journalism as a form of narrative mediation and as a site where both stigma and empathy are negotiated, the article shows that legal and policy reforms alone remain insufficient to reduce stigma in the absence of broader shifts in narrative representation. The study contributes to African mental health scholarship by conceptualizing stigma not only as a problem of policy implementation or public awareness but also as a narrative issue embedded within everyday processes of meaning-making.