Mental Health Blogs

I was very discouraged by a piece that aired on National Public Radio’s “Morning Edition” on Monday. It was another example of lazy, unquestioning reporting of mental health issues by a mainstream media outlet. The fact that it aired on “Morning Edition” is important because the show is one of the most popular on all of radio with an estimated 13 million listeners a week (that puts it just behind Limbaugh and Hannity, although Arbitron recently changed how it measures ratings so some of this may have changed).

The news hook for the story was the mental disorder diagnoses are way up among college students and that a group at Stanford University is using theatre monologues to “come out” about living with mental disorders. I’m all for people being upfront with the world about themselves and so on, but all I heard were a bunch of young people who were deeply-married to their diagnoses–practically boasting about them–and their meds. If that’s what gets them through life as a college student at a tough school, then fine. I just hope they’ll be in a position to someday be a bit more questioning as adults about diagnoses, medications and their futures as people with mental illnesses.

Of course, that would be something that NPR’s reporter, Deborah Franklin, was not. In an 8-plus-minute piece, her reporting was almost completely flavored with bio-psychiatry biases (diagnoses are unquestioned, meds and treatment always work, etc.) and there was no information about, for example, the FDA’s black box warning on anti-depressants which are specifically aimed at the under-25 set. There was nothing about recent research showing diagnoses of bipolar disorder are wrong almost 50 percent of the time and that in a large percentage of cases the disorder resolves by a human’s mid-30s. That would’ve been useful context to have in such a piece and its absence makes me wonder what kind of game NPR thinks it’s playing (I should note that NPR has long been heavily-underwritten, in part, by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the big public health foundation begun by one of J&J’s founders) and who is editing its science and health reporting. If NPR is not interested in contrary points of view, then it really needs to get back in touch with its journalistic values. It would’ve been an easy thing for the reporter to pick up the phone and interview someone from The Icarus Project, which is quite active on some college campuses, but instead Franklin settled for a wildly unbalanced piece.

As a reporter myself, I find that sad and embarrassing. In a piece on “Morning Edition” last year, an NPR reporter described bipolar disorder as “bipolar disease.” I would so like someone at NPR to explain to me the disease process of bipolar “disease.”

Here’s the Franklin piece itself:

Here’s one of the student monologues, read by an actor, involving OCD:

And another, also read by an actor, involving anxiety:

A web version of the piece is here. A transcript of the aired piece is here.

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