Abstract
On 24 March 2015, an aircraft of the Germanwings airline crashed in the French Alps, 100 km north-west of Nice. All 144 passengers and 6 crew members were killed. The crash was deliberately caused by the co-pilot, who had previously been treated for suicidal tendencies and had been medically declared ‘unfit to work’. This mournful event was extensively covered by the media. Although there had been no official statement concerning a possible psychiatric disorder at the time, media outlets indicated depression as the cause of this event and assumed an extended suicide. The stigmatizing prejudice that mentally ill persons are more dangerous than the general public is reinforced (Angermeyer & Schulze, 1998) by one-sided media coverage of publicized acts of crime involving persons with psychiatric disorders. In our study, we empirically investigated to what extent scientific publications contain indications of this kind of stigmatization.
We retrospectively analyzed articles of 12 national German print media sources that discussed the cause of the crash (251 items) between 24 March 2015 and 30 June 2015. We carried out content analysis of these reports with the focus on stigmatization. To focus on stigmatization, we assessed the categories of explicit stigmatization (meaning stigma elements are obvious and clear to identify for the reader) and ‘risky coverage’ (Conrad von Heydendorff & Dressing, 2016). The following categories were used as items of explicit stigmatization: ‘value judgments’ (e.g. describing mentally ill persons with derogatory terms such as ‘crazy’), ‘metaphors/dramatizations’ (e.g. describing depression as a ‘monster with many faces’), ‘criminality’ (claiming that mentally ill persons are generally more criminally inclined than healthy persons), ‘professional limitations’ (considering professional bans for people with mental illness) and ‘treatment obstacles’ (treatment of mental ailments is depicted as a major step for the patients, in contrast to physical ailments). ‘Risky coverage’ implies that in contrast to Explicit Stigmatization, derogatory aspects of media reports are not clear to discover for readers. We define ‘risky coverage’ as the assertion that ‘mental illness’ is the explanation of why the co-pilot caused the crash (the crime) without discussing the complex relationship between mental illness and criminal offending (Angermeyer & Schulze, 1998). The category ‘mental illness’ also includes the sub-group ‘diagnosis’, which was used as a possible cause of the crash in cases where a specific psychiatric diagnosis was named. In addition to ‘mental illness’, we also introduced the categories ‘other reasons’ (specifically named alternative explanations such as technical faults) and ‘unclear reasons’ (no clearly assigned reason).
The text analysis shows that most of the media sources (64.1% of items) used the co-pilot’s possible mental illness to explain the crash. ‘Other reasons’ (19.5%) and ‘unclear reasons’ (25.9%) played a lesser role in the reports. 39.4% of the articles named the specific diagnosis ‘depression’ as a possible cause of the incident. In the ‘explicit stigmatization’ segment, the authors found at least one category of explicit stigmatization in 31.5% of the texts.
Overall, the analyzed articles show a clear media focus on the co-pilot’s possible mental illness as the cause of the crash. The causal link between mental illness and crime seems questionable from a psychiatric perspective. Even if the co-pilot was in fact suffering from a mental disorder at the time of the crash, the causal link between a mental disorder and the action is by no means proven. Furthermore, depression disorders themselves are very rarely associated with acts of violence against others. Rather, offenses of this kind are more frequently seen in the context of narcissistic personality disorders (Bobadilla, 2014). Media reports, stressing the causal link between depression and the criminal offense of the co-pilot, may lead to an unintended stigmatization of millions of mentally ill persons.
Thus, it makes sense to examine the media’s responsibility toward people with mental disorders. We recommend observation of the existing guidelines to journalists (World Health Organization (WHO), 2008) sufficient, to avoid risky coverage and explicit stigmatization effects of mentally ill persons. In addition, specialized expertise seems expedient before publishing articles about mental illness, in order to avoid unintended stigmatization effects.