Do I think the press have changed the way they report all things to do with mental health issues in the last few years?
Yes, absolutely
Do I feel the government is doing absolutely nothing to influence how they're reported and particularly not speaking out against it even when it’s quite blatantly not accurate?
Hell, yes
I feel that is one of the many reasons I feel that those with mental health issues get a raw deal from people. The country is being indoctrinated with the bad attitudes from the press and without the powers that be speaking out, ie the government how are we the people being discriminated against going to do anything about it.
From the guardian I see that this is also on other peoples’ minds too, entitled ‘Mental health discrimination is coming from the top, not the public’
The biggest question I have about this is how the government influences the press? But then maybe I haven’t listened to the politicians enough to know what they were saying.
I personally blame the press more than the government and am ecstatic to see the Leveson inquiry, not that it will tackle this problem but it is about time we gave them a kick up the pants for some of their reporting.
So how has newspaper reporting on mental health changed?
· Increase in reporting between the periods in the newspapers they looked at ~40%
October 2004 to January 2005 –713 documents (once filtered)
October 2010 to January 2011 – 1015 documents (once filtered)
Not really a big surprise however the changes of interest are in the breakdown of the story’s what and how was the content put across. Also of note is after the benefit reforms were announce this group also collected articles for a further 2 months, March to April 2011 and found there was a significant increase in the number of stories (548 documents).
· There has been a reduction in the proportion of articles which describe disabled people in sympathetic and deserving terms, and stories that document the ‘real life’ experiences of living as a disabled person have also decreased
· Some impairment groups are particularly less likely to receive sympathetic treatment: people with mental health conditions and other ‘hidden’ impairments were more likely to be presented as ‘undeserving’.
· Articles focusing on disability benefit and fraud increased from 2.8% in 2005/5 to 6.1% in 2010/11
· There has been an increase in the number of articles documenting the claimed ‘burden’ that disabled people are alleged to place on the economy – with some articles even blaming the recession itself on incapacity benefit claimants;
· There has been a significantly increased use of pejorative language to describe disabled people, including suggestions that life on incapacity benefit had become a ‘Lifestyle Choice’. The use of terms such as ‘scrounger’, ‘cheat’ and ‘skiver’ was found in 18% of tabloid articles in 2010/11 compared to 12% in 2004/5. There were 54 occurrences of these words in 2004/5 compared to 142 in 2010/11. These changes reinforced the idea of disabled claimants as ‘undeserving’.
None of which is a particular surprise to me. So how is this affecting the people reading it?
This study ran focus groups and they found
· When the focus groups were asked to describe a typical story in the newspapers on disability, benefit fraud was the most popular theme mentioned
· The focus groups all claimed that levels of fraud were much higher than they are in reality, with some suggesting that up to 70% of claimants were fraudulent. Participants justified these claims by reference to articles they had read in newspapers.
The department of Work and pensions estimates the fraud at 2.4% for Incapacity benefit and less than 1% for Disability living Allowance.
It also mentioned that
The data from both the content analysis and the audience reception studies are at times confusing and contradictory. There is evidence to support the claim that there has been an increase in coverage of disability as a benefit problem and of disabled people as a burden on the state and there has been an increase in the total number of articles in this category. This shift is one that was recognized by many of our focus group respondents. When asked to describe a typical story on disability in the newspapers today benefits and benefit fraud were by far the most popular topics mentioned. People also have wildly mistaken perceptions about levels of fraud. However whilst general disapproval of benefit cheats was a strong theme in the focus groups people were quick to separate out what they felt were ‘deserving’ disabled people and frauds. Disabled people were seen by all our respondents as deserving of state support.
Sadly this does suggest that peoples’ views are being swayed by the press coverage even though it contradicts what they know to be true from their own experiences.
The impacts these changes have had on the way that disability is perceived by the population is difficult to determine precisely. Many of the participants had very complex and often conflicting views. Many, for example, believed that there was a high level of fraud but all participants also had personal knowledge of friends or family members who were in receipt of a disability benefit and all talked about how hard it had been for them to obtain that benefit. On the other hand they also knew, or claimed to know, people who were committing benefit fraud. All of the research participants made a clear distinction between those who deserved to receive benefits and those who did not and while they were very quick to vilify fraudulent claimants they were also, in the main, very supportive of disabled people. This could be expressed as: disabled people are not fraudsters and fraudsters are not disabled people.
And this is all from the main findings and summary, I haven’t even gotten to the whole document yet. I guess the real question is how much of this is because of how the government is conducting itself.
From the conclusion:
The detailed drivers for these changes are hard to identify and complex. Three of the newspapers we surveyed are strong supporters of the Coalition Government and these papers have all expressed support for the spending cuts introduced as part of the Comprehensive Spending Review to tackle the Budget deficit. The fact that they are much more reluctant to criticise the current government’s policies on disability compared to similar attempts introduced by the last Labour government would suggest that their apparent support for disabled people was at that time contingent. They were, it could be argued, more interested in using disabled people as a means to attack the Labour government than they were in actually supporting disabled people.
So I’m guessing that basically yes the government and it’s attitudes are having an effect, but what it is and will it stay depends on how many people start to question whether they are right.
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