Editorial: The representation of psychiatry and mental health in popular culture
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Mental illness has a complicated history in popular culture (Packer, 2017). Stories about the "madman," whether fictional or real, often unfold in dark, unpredictable, and violent narratives, contributing to moral panics and cultural paranoia in society (Conway, 2016;Cooke, 2017; McMahon-Coleman & Weaver, 2020; Packer, 2017). These representations profoundly shape the public perceptions, attitudes, and behaviours toward psychiatry and mental health (Hoffman et al., 2023;Medero & Hovick, 2023;Packer, 2017;Wang & Parris, 2021). This Research Topic aims to investigate media representations of mental health through diverse conceptual perspectives and analytical approaches.The six articles in this collection covered popular entertainment and prominent cases across the UK, USA, and Belgium, spanning various media forms like newspapers, magazines, television series, and video games. Employing social scientific methods and critical cultural studies, the authors examined phenomena regarding the creative industry, mainstream media, and policies directly and indirectly affecting perceptions and treatment of mental illness. Topics included discrimination and stigma associated with disorders such as schizophrenia, personality disorders, PTSD, depression, and anxiety, alongside intersections with racial trauma and socioeconomic disparities, as well as adverse consequences like imprisonment and suicide.De Hart et al. examined the news coverage of Belgium's first criminal case since euthanasia for psychiatric patients became legal. Using both quantitative and qualitative content analysis, they found predominantly neutral news coverage regardless of ideological backgrounds and publication platforms, though subtle differences emerged in content selection and tonality. The end-of-life decision-making of a 38-year-old woman with borderline personality disorder and/or autism ignited wider legal and ethical debates on euthanasia for incurable mental illness and unbearable suffering, including the problematic nature of defining psychiatric suffering.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".