Rebecca Palpant Shimkets, M.S.
Assistant Director, The Rosalynn Carter Fellowships for Mental Health Journalism, Mental Health Program at The Carter Center
This is, we anticipate, the first of several occasional contributions from The Carter Center relating to its efforts to improve mental health reporting. The American public and the media influence how decision-makers develop, implement, evaluate, and revise policy. Because of the tremendous impact the media has on public opinion and, ultimately, on policymaking, journalists and other media participants must be comfortable with mental health conditions and the people these conditions affect. We encourage you to share your experiences, thoughts, and opinions to help The Carter Center understand and address the good, the bad, and the ugly in the portrayal of and reporting about mental illness in the media. –CFYM
Though nearly one in four adults in the United States experiences a mental illness each year, mental health issues are often covered in the media through the lens of national tragedies or sensationalist news stories.
Unbalanced or shock-value news stories only serve to perpetuate harmful stigma and discrimination against so many valuable members of our communities. Whether a next door neighbor, a teammate in a pickup basketball game at the gym, or a fellow church member, all of us know someone who has a mental illness. But too often, the majority of our friends, family members, or co-workers avoid effective treatment out of fear that they will be stigmatized or discriminated against because of their medical conditions.
That’s why The Carter Center is excited to announce the recipients of the Rosalynn Carter Fellowships for Mental Health Journalism, which for the past 17 years have provided experienced journalists with training and funding to sensitively and accurately report on a mental health topic of their choice. Visit The Carter Center online tomorrow to see the press release announcing this year’s fellows. (Update 7/15: Read the announcement.)
In our last class of American fellows alone, a variety of important topics were covered, from the mental health problems encountered by older, homebound adults to the history of child psychiatry in America. These and other significant topics help to shed light on hidden public health issues and defeat myths and misconceptions about mental health and mental illness.
Since the program’s inception, Carter Center fellows have produced more than 1,400 mental health-related stories, books, and multimedia projects during and after their fellowship years, garnering major awards and distinction for their reporting.
The 2013–2014 class includes six fellows from the United States, two from Colombia, and a dual-fellowship for a team of journalists in Romania. You can read more about their projects on our website.
While we know these fellows are doing critical work, there is still much more to be done to bring knowledge and understanding about mental health conditions to the media and, through them, to the general public.
We can start by recognizing that we don’t know all that we should know about how to improve the social inclusion of people with mental illness. More research is needed on this issue, and we were fortunate to have some of the major researchers, policymakers, and experts in the field discuss this topic at our national mental health policy symposium last November.
Because Care for Your Mind is a community built by and for stakeholders in mental health, we at The Carter Center wanted to hear from you:
What do you think are the biggest concerns regarding the media’s depiction of mental illness? How can these concerns can be addressed?
What are we–—the mental health community—doing well to promote accurate and balanced portrayals of mental illness? What could we do better?
Thank you, in advance, for your thoughts. Working together, we are building a brighter future for everyone.
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