One in Four Conference

The innovative national lifestyle magazine for and by people with mental health difficulties, One in Four, is presenting a free conference on stigma and the representation of mental health in the media and in public communications.

'Talking about mental health - getting it right' - Monday 1st February 2010 at the UCH Education Centre, 250 Euston Road, London, NW1 2PG.

Tickets must be booked in advance.  Contact conference@oneinfourmag.org for more details.

It's for people in communications teams, for journalists, for people in public bodies and for people with mental health difficulties.

Speakers and panellists will all have direct experience in mental health and of working in media and communications.

Why are we doing it?

Most people are not experts in mental health. They draw their information about mental health difficulty and those that experience it from the media.

Good, respectful and measured coverage of mental health makes for good attitudes and reduces stigma. Thoughtless, stereotyping or incorrect representations and language makes for confusion, confirmation of discriminatory attitudes and perpetuation of myths.

One in Four is the UK's first aspirational lifestyle magazine, written by people with mental health difficulties, for people with mental health difficulties. One in Four wants to promote useful, considered and positive coverage of mental health difficulties and those that experience them.

One in Four believes that one of the most important ways of challenging stigma is finding ways to discuss mental health difficulty without falling back on stereotyped views or unhelpful language.

One in Four magazine, and Social Spider CIC the social enterprise that publishes it, wants to challenge the ways in which mental health difficulty is understood.

One in Four is pioneering new ways of writing and reporting about mental health difficulty. It believes that mental health difficulty needs to be normalised and treated as a normal part of life, rather than something exotic or threatening. It is seeking to undermine the news-values that make someone’s mental health status or diagnosis ‘news’. Too often, that a person has mental health difficulties is represented in media stories as indicative of something negative about them.

The situation is that, although things are changing, all forms of media commonly fail to do a number of things:

• According to Shift 81% of media stories about mental health difficulty feature no contribution from people who actually experience them
• Mental health difficulty is still reported as a novel fact in news media, leading to inappropriate connects being made between mental health difficulty and negative behaviour or outcomes * Narratives of mental health difficulty in the media can still be paternalistic or patronising, failing to represent people with mental health difficulties simply as people with additional challenges
• Poor understanding of treatments, procedures and medical science leads to misleading reporting, which in turn influences outcomes for people with mental health difficulties
• Some organisations producing materials about mental health lack the fine grain experiential knowledge of the lives of people who experience mental health difficulty, which can lead to materials that fail to reach their intended audiences effectively
• Journalists can inadvertently confirm stereotypes of mental health difficulty when interviewing individuals or creating other media due to a lack of awareness of how wider attitudes can be confirmed by sticking to tried and tested narratives about mental ill health by focusing on a person’s mental health difficulty as the human interest angle of a story.

While it less common than in previous decades to see media stories or representations that are obviously discriminatory, there are still many instances where media present confusing, stigmatising or inadvertently offensive portrayals or representations of mental health difficulty. Often this can be less the meaning or intention of a piece of media, more the way in which it was said or presented.

Our conference will be a space where these challenges can be discussed and a new agenda set for coverage of mental health difficulty.