Google research

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/media/media-blamed-for-stirring-fear-of-mental-illness-726886.html

• attacked the media for its portrayal of the mentally ill as causing "irrational and inaccurate alarm".
• "This unfounded alarm has significant consequences not just for those who are mentally ill and those who care for them, but also for the implementation of public policy."
• focused on the small number of people with mental illness in high-security hospitals such as Broadmoor, Rampton and Ashworth who might be considered dangerous.


http://apt.rcpsych.org/cgi/content/full/9/2/135

• patients have their symptoms tempered and mediated through mass media ‘infotainment’, their expectations of treatment are coloured by a multitude of print and broadcast items.
• it is about trends, not facts, reasons, not causes, and subjective evaluations of others’ perceptions. Despite these limitations, we can examine how form changes constantly, but content (themes) and mechanisms (the news cycle, cross-fertilisation between media, the obsession with celebrity, commercial pressures, self- and state-censorship) remain constant. I focus here on four main media formats, but similar mechanisms are found in interplay in the arts and in the ‘invisible’ media of the advertising, fashion, popular music, video games and computer industries.

http://www.ontario.cmha.ca/about_mental_health.asp?cID=7601

• Stories about or references to people with mental health issues are rarely out of the headlines in news stories or plotlines in film and television, yet research indicates that media portrayals of mental illness are often both false and negative (Diefenbach, 1997 [citing Berlin & Malin, 1991; Gerbner, 1980; Nunnally, 1957; Wahl & Harman, 1989]).
• When mental illness or behaviours commonly associated with mental illness are presented as a character’s main personality traits, to the exclusion of any other characteristics, the illness or behaviour becomes the only way of defining that person and the main point of the story (Day & Page, 1986, cited in Olstead, 2002)

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/wales/8377926.stm

• The BBC's longest-running TV soap, the Welsh language Pobol y Cwm, has beaten rivals EastEnders and Doctors to a mental health award.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EastEnders

• The soap also tackled the issue of mental illness and carers of people who have mental conditions, illustrated with mother and daughter Jean and Stacey Slater; Jean suffers from Bipolar disorder, and teenage daughter Stacey was her carer (this storyline won a Mental Health Media Award in September 2009)

http://www.mind.org.uk/news/2461_bbc_leads_british_media_in_battle_to_break_the_last_great_taboo

• EastEnders received the prestigious Making a Difference award for the long running soap’s ongoing commitment to mental health issues. The actresses Lacey Turner and Gillian Wright, who play mother and daughter Stacy Branning and Jean Slater, both diagnosed with bipolar disorder, collected the award.
• “The quality of entries has been incredibly high this year and demonstrates that positive and authentic portrayals of mental health are compatible with the kind of original, creative and groundbreaking programming we have seen this evening.”

http://www.ejumpcut.org/currentissue/harperUKmentaltv/index.html

• In the 1970s, anti-sexist and anti-racist cultural studies began to replace the binary framework of “good/accurate” versus “bad/inaccurate” images of minority groups that had theretofore prevailed (Pollock, 1977) with a more flexible, anti-essentialist emphasis on difference. As the burden of representational correctness has lifted, critiques of minority representation have been loosed from their positivist prison, problematizing any talk of “true” or “accurate” representations of women or visible minority groups. In the same way, I would suggest, studies of media representations of madness can no longer rest upon essentialist psychiatric definitions of mental illness that take no account of class, gender or racial difference.

http://www.thepunch.com.au/articles/skins-take-on-mental-health-is-on-the-skids/

• This is a discouraging message to send to Skins’ viewers. The show’s prime audience is 16 – 24, which happens to also be the demographic most affected by mental illness. While Skins viewers are aware they are shown a fictional, dramatic character of a psychologist to shock and entertain, Skins is not alone in presenting these negative stereotypes; rarely are we shown positive or accurate depictions of mental health practitioners on screen.