TV stations should not deepen mental health stigma

The Daily Graphic in its Thursday August 31, 2017 issue carried a story titled ‘Mental Health Authority builds capacity of journalists’ as reported by Caroline Boateng.

The event was meant to ‘…provide the opportunity to assess their [media] reportage on mental health conditions and get acquainted with the new dispensation of mental health that the Act 846 instituted’. This couldn’t have come at a more ideal time as it had triggered my thoughts regarding the way some television stations air stories about mental patients.

Some television stations have recently taken to a certain line of coverage that ‘expose’ the predicaments of mental patients rather than address the objectives of their coverage. I don’t know the legal implications of the contents they broadcast to the whole world. I feel awful anytime I see mentally-challenged persons being paraded on TV with their full identities.

It was between 4.16 p.m. and 4.24 p.m. on Sunday June 18, 2017 when I watched a documentary on a popular Twi-speaking TV station based in Accra and the spectacle I saw made me feel there might be something wrong unless of course it is backed by law.

In the documentary, some mentally ill persons were shown on TV with their full identities without taking their sensibilities into consideration.

When the screen was in motion as I watched the documentary with some empathetic discomfort, one thing that struck me was whether the editors of the station would allow the documentary to air if the ‘victims’ were their own relatives or even friends!

The documentary in itself was not a bad concept but I think the station could have done better by blurring or censoring the images before they are put on air.

In the said documentary, some of the patients even expressed their displeasure and started throwing objects at the crew at the time they were being filmed. That alone should have been an indication that in spite of their conditions, they still feel human too and deserve the right of privacy. How would society take any of such persons when it so happens that he or she gets completely healed and had to still fit back into this our society?

With the stigmatization of this condition in our part of the world being a big deal, I don’t think relatives of mentally ill people would want the whole world to know that a relative has gone bonkers. More often than not, some families visit such ‘sick’ patients on the quiet at the various psychiatric hospitals for fear of being stimagtised along the patient and that, I think, should have been taken into consideration.

The issue about mental illness is one that families would want to deal with in confidence especially with the stigma that goes with it.

This TV station is not the first and the only one to have gone this way as I have observed some other English-dominant-speaking TV stations doing same as news items without blurring the pictures before airing.

It’s about time we took the sensibilities of persons with psychiatric challenges into consideration. How can you show pictures and the clear identities of mentally ill patients to the whole world all in the name of documentaries and / or news and expect them (the patients and their relatives) to be happy about the fact that they were on TV! For heaven’s sake these are not criminals; they have just found themselves in an unfortunate state of mind that could have happened to any other person including anybody!

mzogbenu@yahoo.com
The writer is an Insurance Practitioner and author of the weekly ‘Insurance Bakery’ Column of the Graphic Business.