Mediating Mental Health: Contexts, Debates and Analysis

This book is fueled by a fundamental insight: the popular picture of those who are said to have mental problems places limits on how the rest of us can think. The options available to therapists, for our public policies that address mental conditions, and even in our everyday interactions with those same persons are all shaped by the terms, the ideas, and the dramatic "mediations" that populate the airways, appear in film productions, and provide the underlying narrative architecture for the evening news. One consistent theme in this very smart and multi-threaded book is a thorough discussion of the the traps that are implicit in the very terms we use to describe people with mental problems. Those persons have been the ongoing target of stereotypes and sensational misrepresentations that present them as dangerous to everyone around them, and they are characterized as the source of the world's problems, large and small. We are repeatedly told that dictators are unstable or unbalanced and that family problems arise because neurotic individuals cannot control themselves. More broadly, our political news prefers to tell that well-worked narrative of the unstable philandering public figure or unstable crooked politicians rather than recount the anonymous network of influence out of which our lives are assembled. Mental instability has, as the book argues, become an international all-purpose "cause" that makes the world appear much more dangerous and more intractably out-of-control than it is.....and there are some powerful interests who profit from that all-too-convenient narrative. Distracted by the stereotypes rooted in Dracula or in Freddie Krueger, we pay too little attention to the rational actors who are walking away with the store. This book gives an in-depth analysis of the numerous areas where the mediations - the presentation and dramatization - of mental health has a decisive role. It is a very sophisticated study in making use of many different sources and parallel analytic structures for making its case. Prof. Birch clearly demonstrates that his own analysis stands alongside a score of sympathetic perceptive studies by other imminent scholars and professional therapists who call attention to the bum rap that mental problems have in the popular imagination. Mental problems have been made into the incarnation of a demonic force, and our secular society has come to to see mental difficulty as a sin. But very few people pay much attention to these skeptics and analysts who keep saying that our picture of those with mental problems is bogus; instead we are awash inmisrepresentations of mental illness as a pervasive and terrible motive that defies explanation or cure. This analysis of the ways we tell the mental health story is not for the casual reader; it is instead a treasure-trove of insights, analysis, and suggestions for how to understand one of the major narrative concepts that configure our lives. It is a source-book for methods and analytical standpoints to use for explaining those conceptual patterns. And beyond the subject of how mental problems get mirrored back to us, the book makes a number of far-sighted suggestions for how to grasp the myths - the informing narratives - that hover around us in so many other areas of popular discourse. Those stories are like the bats in that famous Goya painting whose title says it all: "the sleep of reason brings forth monsters." The monsters, in this case, are not persons with mental problems but rather the stigmas and stereotypes out of which we construct them and project the bogeymen of terrorists, tycoons, or killers that - so we are told - are stalking us.

This book is well worth the cost! It is packed full with precise descriptions, thoughtful analyses, and productive ideas. Birch analyzes popular media forms that involve mental health issues. He presents several mediations from art to comics to news. He describes film and televisions fictions including "Mad, Sad, or Bad" and "The Sopranos" in ways that bring the stories and episodes to life for you. Then he unpacks these mediations to show how vocabulary, presentation manners (use of voice, gestures, and expression), visual and sequential juxtapositions, film editing and more convey knowledge and often serious misinformation about mental health for individuals and society. Birch also engages news reporters, mental health professionals and people who have experienced mental health conditions. He thoroughly catalogs their responses to specific popular media presentations about mental health. One of the most exciting segments of the book describes how Birch encouraged people who have experienced conditions to create their own presentations about mental health. Some re-write news reports, some compose films, some write poems, and some create short documentaries to tell their stories. When a few of these presentations are actually aired on local television, the results are truly inspiring! Perhaps a change is possible. Perhaps, with efforts like this book, we can learn to avoid harmful stigmatization and stereotyping. Perhaps we can aim for truth.

This book provides an insightful and brilliant overview of deep issues surrounding the mediation and characterization of mental health in mass media, with additional content related to the efforts of those facing mental health issues to dramatize and revise the stereotypes that they face. Birch details community theatre and other activities as well as deep theories of media in general, pointing to new routes for understanding mental health. This is the most important book on the topic, and should be read by academics as well as general readers.