Changes in Social Representations of Mental Illness: the last twenty-five years on the Italian Press

Abstract

The specific role played by mass communications as mediators between science and common sense here comes under focus. We would like to single out the relevance of mass communications not only because of their information they give about scientific point of view, and of their circulation of social representations, but chiefly because of the contribution they make to the production of social representations. Regarding mental illness in particular, these use some more general representational frameworks of a political and ideological nature, which are both internal and external to the mass communication system, and which are expressed with a rhetorical and pseudodialogical type of discourse. Our arguments are based on data from longitudinal research carried out in Italy. We have examined how different newspaper headings have presented mental illness and the laws regarding mental illness over the last twenty-five years. The years selected for closer examination correspond to some of the more significant stages of psychiatric reform in Italy. Historically, these stages consist of: a) the opening up of the `psychiatry question' (1969); b) the birth of ‘Psichiatria Democratica' (1973); c) the approval of the law now in force, with the abolition of mental hospitals (1978); d) the application at a local level (1983); and e) the crises about and urgency for a newsolution to mental illness. Data analyses confirm the rhetorical style of mass-media communication, showing the contemporary presence of certain contradictory `themata' concerning mental illness.