Everything That’s Wrong With Our Approach to Mental Illness, in One News Story — Medium
Reporters, editors, and police officers need to take a step back and think about the logic of what they’re doing. For too long, the shorthand approach to encounters with people who may be suffering from some sort of mental illness is, essentially, to laugh about it and write it up.
Take the story from the Orlando Sentinel, which is hardly a tabloid (the paper wrote thoughtfully about my decision to reveal my mental illness, and recently published an op-ed of mine on barriers to mental health care.
But this story pissed me off, right from the headline: Cops: Astor man said he is creator, owns world. (It’s the rare case of a headline without the word “Kardashian” that proves the story to follow isn’t actually news)
Seeing that in my social media feed, I tensed, and clicked — expecting a few things: first, that this was going to be yet another case of news media playing mental illness for laughs (and clicks), and second, that this was going be yet another case of a person in need of help getting sent instead to jail, branded a criminal.
More: Everything That’s Wrong With Our Approach to Mental Illness, in One News Story — Medium