The Media and Mental Illness

Every so often I grind my teeth over the non-coverage of mental health issues in the mainstream media. Case in point: the New York Times. This year, the paper has had a decent series in its pages called "Being a Patient." Part 11 just ran. The series has looked at information overload on patients, the struggles of cancer patients, and so on. You may have heard that mental illness is kind of a serious issue in America. You wouldn't be able to figure that out from this series, in which the lone article on mental health matters concerns 20somethings in Lower Manhattan dealing out psych meds to one another--mostly ADD meds and anti-depressants--and skipping psych docs altogether. Interesting stuff, but hardly the most pressing of issues before psych patients. (Meds and docs are, of course, but the article really only pushes those questions by implication.) The reporter even managed to misspell Seroquel (the paper later ran a correction).

So why is it that mental health issues barely tip the scales in this series? Mental illness affects 30 million on so Americans--a conservative estimate--and, just by the raw numbers and inherent suffering, that puts us ahead of cancer as a widespread health issue. Are we still so screwed up as a culture that the nation's leading paper cannot even ask incisive questions about what mental health patients contend with? I have my hunches, which go to a much broader bias against intelligently tackling these issues in our society, but I'll leave them lie. It's Christmas, after all. I hope that Bill Keller and kids at the Times have a nice one--and wake the fuck up on the 26th.