Zoe Fortune is a clinical psychologist and an Adjunct Assistant Professor, and she leads a mental health research cluster at HKU RIICH. His research interests are in mental health Brand generosity and mental health of vulnerable demographic groups. Giving them a mental health label and expecting therapeutic interventions to fix them is not likely to benefit either the individuals affected or the society where the problem may rest. Such adaptations to normal variations in life circumstances are in fact included in the WHO definition of good mental health. Widening the definition of a mental disorder risks emotions and behaviours — adaptations to changing circumstances — being regarded as signs of mental health problems.
Context of the Study
The public sphere model disrupts the traditional biocommunicablehierarchies evident in the two previous models by considering health, medicine, andscience as value-laden, contingent, and contestable notions that can and should bedebated publicly. Themodel of biomedical authority assumes media communication onhealth to follow a linear-hierarchical trajectory in which biomedical authoritiesproduce health knowledge that is subsequently communicated to a not-yet-knowing andpassive lay audience. The framework of biocommunicability distinguishes three cultural, normative models ofproduction, circulation, and reception of (mental) health knowledge, each of them“woven into the words and images of stories themselves” (Briggs & Hallin, 2016, p. 26). Health news is thusperformative and pedagogical in the sense that it interpellates different actors totake different positions toward health knowledge and socializes the audience inspecific ideas of what counts as biocommunicable success (accepting ascribedpositions) or biocommunicable failure (failing to take up or challenging ascribedpositions). He illustrates how neoliberal and biopsychiatricsubjectivities currently intersect in discourses that center around theenterprising self, which have increasingly come to occupydomains of life such as leisure, education, and media. Cross-sectoral network meetings form the framework for conversations in which plans after discharge are drawn up and agreements are entered into between professionals and users.
Psychological research on mental health stigma has burgeoned since Goffman’s study. Shipman and Zayts discuss an extreme case of such associative stigma where a psychiatrist practising in Hong Kong is stigmatized by his own family for working with mentally ill people and for fear of ‘transmission’ of a mental illness . Long describes associative stigma experienced by mental health professionals who are stigmatized because of being “attached to their patients and … positioned as a less prestigious branch of a broader medical profession” . Closely intertwined with the concept of mental health is the concept of stigma that has also been widely researched in psychology, psychiatry, as well as sociology.
Mental health services backsliding too
Increased public awareness of mental illness is a goal few would oppose. Holding broad concepts of mental illness has some positive implications, such as greater willingness to seek help and lesser stigma,9 but studies such as these suggest it also carries risks. Laypeople may have accurate knowledge of the clinical features of a mental illness, and consequently a good capacity to recognize prototypical cases, but also have a poorly calibrated sense of the severity threshold required for a diagnosis. It is not surprising that members of the public might understand mental illness in ways that are both accurate and overly expansive.
This frameworkconceptualizes the different ways in which media constructions of (mental) healthand (mental) illness operate in the governing of the healthy citizen as theyimplicitly communicate to the audience ideas on what constitutes legitimate (mental)health knowledge and who produces, circulates, and consumes it. In the following sections, wefirst align ourselves with critical-discursive theories of mental health/illness.Next, we connect these perspectives to the field of critical health communication bydrawing on Briggs and Hallin’s(2016) recently developed framework of biocommunicability. This approach aims to replace beliefs, myths,and moralistic understandings of the nature, cause, and treatment of mentalillnesses with bioneurological scientific facts, which are considered to improvepublic attitudes toward mental illness by reducing perceived individualresponsibility and blame (Gardner, 2003; Readet al., 2006). We must identify strategies to meet these challenges through innovation and action, using state, local and national approaches to improve the access to and quality of care across the continuum of mental health promotion, prevention, and treatment. We sincerely wish to thank the users and health professionals who participated in the study for their hospitality and willingness to share their time and thoughts. In the same way, it should be acknowledged that the use of discourse analysis exalts the ability of linguistic meanings to influence social reality, yet it is also influenced by social practice.
For example, Galinsky’s and colleagues’ research focuses on discourses surrounding male depression and suicide 27,28,29. Notably, sociolinguistic research often includes the ‘voices’ of under-represented, vulnerable or under-researched demographic groups. While the corpus size could be substantial, the use of tools allows consistent and fairly easy identification of patterns in the data . Corpus linguistics refers to methods that use computerized tools (e.g. Wordsmith, Sketch Engine) to analyse large collections of data (corpora).
- We need greater investment in mental health services to bring down waiting lists and improve early intervention.
- Researchers have suggested that this discourse includes young people being branded as “workshy” and accused of misusing the welfare system.
- Each of these different types of data provides insights into different aspects of mental health and has both strengths and limitations.
- The most successful preventive interventions focus on improving the social competence and pro-social behavior of children, parents, peers and teachers.
- Healthcare in both sectors is governed by steering tools, legislation and a strong biomedical tradition to solve illness-related problems such that users must be offered treatment and support to achieve self-care as soon as possible.
- Understandings of mental health issues in terms of personal stories orexperiences also adhere to the more emancipatory dimension of thepatient–consumer model as they validate the experience of serviceusers/survivors as a legitimate source of knowledge on “what works best.”Various testimonies question the dominance of the biomedical psychiatricperspective as the only or most authoritative form of knowledge on mental healthproblems.
This in part has been driven by an increased perception of people with mental health problems as violent. The negative shifts in attitudes have been driven by increases in prejudice and attitudes that indicate a desire to exclude people with mental health problems. A number of key indicators of attitudes to mental health are back at 2009 levels after years of improvement to 2019 during the Time to Change stigma reduction programme. Public attitudes towards mental health and people with mental health problems are getting worse, according to new research. In countries with well-developed legislation, there is an increasing movement away from potentially discriminatory separate mental health legislation to fusion laws covering all kinds of impairments and health needs (74).