These blogs are written by people with personal experience of mental illness. They review and reflect on some of the ways mental health has been portrayed in the media, including TV episodes and newspaper articles.

The way mental illness is portrayed and reported in the media is incredibly powerful in educating and influencing the public. Our Media Advisory Service works with journalists, script writers and other media professionals to help ensure fictional and factual portrayals of people with mental health problems in the media are accurate and sensitive.

By writing about their own experiences and their reactions to these portrayals, these bloggers raise awareness of the different attitudes they have encountered to their mental health and how the media can help shape these attitudes. Pledge to help end mental health stigma today >>

Stereotypes within TV fuelled my imposter syndrome

Suzie, August 4, 2020

At 16 years old I sat in my first therapy session and was told that I “had no real reason for having depression”. I was doing well in school, I had plenty of friends and there was no single particular traumatic event that had triggered the decline of my mental health. According to my therapist this made it impossible for me to feel anxious or depressed. After two more sessions I was totally convinced that I’d manifested these feelings myself and actually had perfect mental health, so I left.

Before I had them myself, I feared people with mental health problems

Milly, March 14, 2018

There is something unsettling about the ambiguity of mental health. The brain is of course steeped in mystery; a complex organ we have less understanding of than any other organ in our body, the core to one of life’s greatest mysteries – life itself. Fear often always follows the unknown, the misunderstood and from experience fear has always followed mental health.

People with mental illness are real people too

Penny, February 12, 2018

There is a secret; one that nobody is prepared to talk about; one so shocking it may bring down society as we know it. Am I talking about a scandal, or some sort of political corruption? Am I talking about some secret society that quietly rules over us, or perhaps I am talking about the fact we are all lizard people. While I would infinitely prefer to talk about any one of these things, I am in fact talking about the truth that, literally, nobody is talking about. I am talking about the fact that people with mental illness walk among us.

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