It seemed like an innocuous and useful quote, an official commenting that, in some ways, multiculturalism is “schizophrenic.”
But it took reader like Patricia Teskey to point out that the term, as used, could offend, misinform and hurt many people.
“As it is here, `schizophrenic’ is commonly misused to mean giving a mixed message, or holding two contradictory points of view simultaneously,” Teskey wrote of a May 26 story. “In fact, neither of these are characteristic of people with schizophrenia.”
The media frequently uses schizophrenic to mean dual or multiple personalities completely different disorders with completely different symptoms, Teskey says.
This is not the first time The Star has misused this term. A child actor who had to attend school in between bouts of filming on a movie set was recently described as ending up “slightly schizophrenic” about it all.
Too often, terms related to mental illness are misused in The Star. Manic-depressive seems to be a favourite. Writers use it to connote general instability, as The Star did in describing a “manic-depressive” stock market.
In the past six months, The Star has referred to a “bizarre manic-depressive mother.” The evil computer from the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey was described as: “a manic-depressive computer with a control fetish.”
It seems people with mental illness are one of the few remaining groups that are open targets for cheap shots and insensitivity the paper would never throw at people with physical illnesses, such as Multiple Sclerosis or AIDS.
Karen Nusbaum, spokesperson for the Mood Disorders Association of Ontario, says the effect is “most unfortunate” for people with mental illness. She was “really saddened” by a recent commercial that caught her young son’s eye, showing a new bad-guy action figure called “Psycho.”
“All of this distorts the reality of mental illness,” she says. “The media is such a big problem.”
Many people with mental illness cope quite well and live productive lives, she says.
But this is not the picture often portrayed in newspapers, including The Star.
This paper has had some highly sensitive and groundbreaking stories showing the true face of mental illness. But the small, day-to-day distortions that still creep into our coverage have their stigmatizing effect.
One of the worst effects, according to Steve Lurie, of the Toronto Branch of the Canadian Mental Health Association, is these stereotypes and distortions increase the stigma of mental illness. This, in turn, prevents people from getting the help they need. At any time, he said, only 25 per cent of people who need help for mental illness actually get it.
“The good news — things like how treatment outcomes for schizophrenia and affective mood disorders are better than for many other physical illnesses rarely gets out,” he says. “Many people with mental illness are very creative and high achievers in society. But you’d never know it from the media picture.”
Ian Mayes, the popular Readers’ Editor at London’s The Guardian wrote: “we stand in relation to some aspects of mental health — particularly in the way we refer to mental illness, in the language that we use and misuse roughly where we stood in relation to race, say, 20 or 30 years ago.”
It is an apt summation. And distortions about mental illness are just as damaging as racial insensitivity.
It is time we acknowledged all our prejudices. People with mental illness deserve better.
