Mainstream Media and Mental Health: Where We’re Going Wrong

It’s Mental Health Awareness Month, also known as Mental Health May, and it’s not been long since Mental Health Awareness Week. It’s therefore timely to talk about this, but that isn’t what prompted this post. I’ve seen a few things on Twitter/X lately, all of which have pissed me off, and I think we should look at them.

The first is Benji Waterhouse’s new book, You Don’t Have to Be Mad to Work Here. I’ll start by confessing to not having read it yet, although I do have a plan to review it soon. I saw it advertised, by the author, on Twitter and was very excited to check it out. I found a sample in the Telegraph, which quickly killed my enthusiasm for the wider book. The sample describes a patient, presented as ‘Femi’, who is experiencing a delusion as part of a psychosis. This particular delusion involves Femi’s belief that he is a werewolf. The extract describes an encounter in a low stimulus or seclusion room, where Femi is being kept on account of having made verbal threats to staff and other patients. We, as an audience, are invited into this encounter, which Waterhouse describes as being a ‘fly on the padded wall’. The scene depicts attempts to persuade Femi to take medication, which he refuses, that result in a restraint and rapid tranquilisation. Femi is also described as charging at staff with his mouth open, trying to bite people: an image that doesn’t do much to challenge the idea that people with psychosis are prone to violence. This extract leaves a bizarre impression as it locates the comedy in the wrong places. Waterhouse describes those enacting the restraint as struggling in an almost comic, slapstick way, whilst Femi himself is described as being genuinely terrified by the experience. As a reader, I’m not sure what I’m supposed to or allowed to laugh at. I suppose in this sense it does capture the spirit of life on a ward.

Today, I turned to Benji’s stand up comedy to try and understand his angle. I found jokes about patients overdosing on 99 paracetamol because, although they had bought a hundred, one fell on the floor and had ‘germs on it’. That’s the punchline. He also reported witnessing a karaoke session in which a patient sang Crazy by Gnarls Barkley. He then proceeds to sing some of the lines in a flattened monotone, a symptom for some, for added comic effect.

Not long after I tweeted my concerns, Waterhouse reached out to me on Twitter via DM. He wanted to reassure me that he means no harm, and I responded that he might still manage it despite not intending it. Our exchange came to a close when he asked me to stop tweeting about him, and I responded that I’ll be continuing to share my thoughts but in a fair way. He claims that psychoeducation is his main goal, with the comedy being a vehicle to get the message across. I’m not convinced.

Then of course there’s Shaun Lintern, who has recently put together an investigative piece on the pressures faced by mental health services. That isn’t the emphasis of the article, though. The emphasis is on the 233 deaths caused by people with mental health problems, with no mention of important caveats. An example would be that those 233 deaths refer to any case where mental health problems were a factor, and yet the article only offers examples of deaths caused by individuals experiencing psychosis. Valdo Calocane is mentioned as going on a ‘rampage’, and someone else is included presumably for no other reason than that they attacked someone with an axe. Lintern’s responses to my concerns about the language have been few and far between, and quite hollow when they do arrive. His responses essentially amount to ‘you didn’t read it, did you?’ and ‘there are no factual errors’. He doesn’t appear to be particularly interested in the many tweets people have put out there expressing concern with the language used. Psychosis and violence are regularly conflated in the piece, and the vignettes provided are among the most sensationalist examples. Lintern feels that we shouldn’t shy away from difficult truths or Mollycoddle readers, but I don’t think this is a fair defence for the article’s framing.

The above leads to me to two observations about mainstream media and mental health. The first is that mainstream publishers seem quite happy to champion stories about people with lived experiences of mental health, as long as they’re coming from professional sources. We’re invited, somewhat voyeuristically, to become flies ‘on the padded wall’ in Waterhouse’s text. We saw the same with Nathan Filer, who won the Costa Book of the Year Award for The Shock of the Fall, a fictional account of a man’s experiences of schizophrenia. It’s quite brazen for someone with no personal experience of the condition to write a fictional account of it. Filer then went on to write another book, The Heartland: finding and losing schizophrenia, which is also on my ‘to-review’ list but appears to be little more than an antipsychiatry text. Filer was an RMN before he became a reader in Creative Writing at Bath Spa, and this doesn’t strike me as a sufficient basis for writing about schizophrenia in either of these ways.

The second observation has to do with media representations. Dr James Balfour did his PhD on media representations of schizophrenia, and I’ve recently had the pleasure of reading and reviewing his book. Keep an eye out on this blog for updates about the status of that review. I’ve suggested to Lintern that he read it, to gain some perspective on the many traps he’s fallen prey to in his reporting. He hasn’t given any strong indications that he’ll be reading it, unfortunately.

Perhaps I’m just bitter, but none of this sits right with me.