Portrayal of Mental Illness in Canadian Newspapers

The present article reports results from a content analysis of 103 newspaper reports taken from eight major Canadian newspapers, and selected at random from the Canadian Newspaper Index. The portrayal of mental illness and mentally ill persons in these reports was compared with that in samples of articles taken from two comparison mental health publications not receiving popular circulation. As compared with these latter publications, the content analysis indicated that the newspapers portrayed mental illness and the mentally ill in a manner which could be described as essentially pejorative, thus seeming to support frequent observations and complaints from the mental health establishment about inadequate or unfair coverage of mental illness in the popular print media. At the same time, the newspaper medium appeared to present more favourable images of nontraditional (example: community-based) mental health practices, than of traditional (example: hospital-based) practices. Implications of such results for the attitudes and beliefs of the general public vis-à-vis mental illness are offered, with special reference to the influence of the print media.