Media Madness: Public Images of Mental Illness - Essay Example

• “It became clear to me, as it was to the psychiatric patients with whom I worked, that inaccurate and demeaning public images of mental illness and mentally ill people had significant practical—and often undesirable—consequences”. (Wahl xii)
• “They appeared to see people with mental illnesses as dangerous and potentially assaultive as well as childlike and incompetent”. (Wahl 2)
• “Americans themselves identify mass media as the source from which they get most of their knowledge of the mental illness. That they do so is certainly no surprise, for not only are these media ubiquitous in our lives, but mental illness is a very common theme in their presentations”. (Wahl 3)

Summary

Mental illness is a health issue that is dealt with wrongly. People have erroneous concepts about mental illness and these concepts are mainly built because of mass media. The mentally ill patients or any person visiting the psychiatrist for any mental health issue faces difficulty in dealing with people around them because of the negative and wrong portrayal of mentally ill persons created socially. Media plays a crucial role in building people’s perceptions about mental illnesses because it has the potential capability of affecting the minds of people. For dealing with the pervasive images of mental illnesses, mass media requires a major change.

There is a general concept that mentally ill persons are dangerous and attacking as they do not have the sense to differentiate between wrong and right.