Mental Health in Media

1 Credit · Level: Undergraduate

No medical condition has been cloaked in as much shame and blame throughout our history as mental illness. And no doctors have provoked as much skepticism and outright hostility in the mass media as those who treat mental health issues. Those long-standing attitudes have a big present-day impact: As we’ll see in this class, they’ve helped make it enormously difficult for those who suffer to get the help that they need. In this workshop, students will read, observe, and reflect upon how representations of mental health issues and treatments in popular media (journalism, film, fiction and non-fiction) have fed a culture of mental health stigma. They’ll come to understand the pernicious effects that the stories we tell have on real people with real problems that require real help. They’ll learn strategies for pushing back against our culture’s often unrecognized narratives of stigma in their social and academic lives, and in the world beyond Georgetown’s gates. And they’ll learn about new media initiatives that are doing great work to create change from within.