[Mental illness and media]

Abstract

Many knowledges on the mental disease that the community possesses are turning out of information disclosed from the media. It's common in the press to connect actions of violence and murders to the mental diseases. For this reason, the reader is induced to infer that murders and other violent actions are more frequent in people who have suffered from mentally ill, than in the general population. The mystifying impression provided by media accrues from the fact that these reports are rarely compensated from positive reports. Objective of the present study is to characterize the type of information concerning mental illness diffused from the local daily paper "Giornale di Brescia" in the year 2001. The results show that many articles connote negatively the mental disease. The journalistic sensationalism, denounced facing the speech of the prejudgment in the comparisons of the mentally ill people, seems to still remain, in the considered year of publication, one unchanging tendency.