The Handbook of Mental Health Communication (eBook)

Marco C. Yzer, Jason T. Siegel (Herausgeber)

eBook Download: EPUB

2025
1307 Seiten
Wiley-Blackwell (Verlag)
9781394179893 (ISBN)

Infos

The first book of its kind to offer a transdisciplinary exploration of mass communication approaches to mental health

In the Handbook of Mental Health Communication, a panel of leading scholars from multiple disciplines presents a comprehensive overview of theory and research at the intersection of mass communication and mental health. With timely and authoritative coverage of the impact of message-based mental health promotion, this unique volume places mental health communication in the context of socio-cultural causes of mental illness - synthesizing public health, psychopathology, and mass communication scholarship into a single volume.

Throughout the Handbook, nearly one hundred contributing authors emphasize that understanding communication effects on mental health outcomes begins with recognizing how people across the spectrum of mental illness process relevant information about their own mental health. Fully integrated chapters collectively translate biased information attention, interpretation, and memory in mental health illness to real-world implications of mental illness symptomatology and across the spectrum of mental health issues and disorders.

Providing a clear, evidence-based picture of what mental health promotion should look like, The Handbook of Mental Health Communication is an invaluable resource for advanced undergraduate and graduate students, scholars, researchers, lecturers, and all health communication practitioners.

Textauszug

Preface

In a 2023 opinion piece in Time magazine, Gabriel Boric (who at the time of writing is the President of the Republic of Chile) and Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus (who at the time of writing is Director‐General of the World Health Organization) argued that mental health is a fundamental human right. Boric and Adhanom Ghebreyesus stressed that the extensive detrimental effects of mental illness and poor mental well‐being on individual, public, and societal health call for a large‐scale, multisectoral response from a wide array of stakeholders. There are essentially two parts to such a response. One focuses on the structural environment of mental health and mental illness and includes efforts by various stakeholders, who separately or in collaboration, improve structural conditions of people's lives, invest in mental health care capacity, and strengthen access to mental health care. The other focuses on how people think, feel, and act regarding mental health and mental illness and includes the promotion of mental health in whole populations as well as in specific priority groups such as people who currently have severe mental illness.

Purposefully planned mass communication messages are a potentially useful tool to promote mental health. Indeed, there is a long history of the use of mass media messages to promote mental health. This does not mean, however, that message‐based mass communication interventions have proven to be generally effective. There are many reasons why mental health mass communication interventions may not work; for example, such interventions compete with many other media messages for an audience's attention in an increasingly cluttered media environment, there may not be sufficient funding available to ensure prolonged exposure, and social norms around mental health may not be conducive to favorable responses in some cases. Perhaps even more important, however, is the lack of an established knowledge base; the scientific domain of mental health mass communication remains in its infancy.

To enhance knowledge of how mental health mass communication can effectively be used as a tool for mental health promotion, scientific knowledge of how to create effective mental health messaging must be shared across domains. There already exists excellent work from researchers across the communication discipline who have investigated means of improving the lives of people experiencing mental health challenges. However, a lack of intellectual research space shared by mental health communication scholars among themselves and with scholars from other disciplines has minimized the potential impact of this work. Even worse, siloed research can lead to the use of messages that can harm the very people they were meant to help—people with mental illness. This contention was the impetus for this handbook.

The Handbook of Mental Health Communication was designed based on the notion that optimizing mass communication messaging approaches to mental health requires the integration of insights from various disciplines relevant to communicating mental health. There exists a wealth of knowledge of the psychopathological, social, epidemiological, political, and etiological aspects of mental health and mental illness, and much is known about communication principles that can inform the development of messages on a variety of health issues. An amalgamation of this literature is a necessary and exciting next step in evolving the burgeoning mental health mass communication field.

The Handbook of Mental Health Communication brings together a wealth of diverse conceptual frameworks and empirical lines of research that collectively offer complementary insights for optimizing mental health mass communication. The 33 chapters in this handbook are written by 85 outstanding experts worldwide. Integrating diverse insights from various disciplines makes the handbook of interest to a broad audience. We hope that the handbook will be a resource for those who want to use messaging to improve the lives of people with mental illness.

There are seven parts to this handbook. The chapters in each part address different aspects of primary questions that need to be understood before designing mental health mass communication messages. In part I, Lisa Vos and colleagues, Elayne Ahern, Caroline Ostrand and Monica Luciana, and Fei Ying and colleagues review the causes, manifestations, and consequences of biased information processing in mental illness. In part II, Romy RW and colleagues, Brian Quick and colleagues, Seth Noar and colleagues, David Vogel and colleagues, Annie Fox and colleagues, and Anthony Jorm discuss definitional and measurement issues related to a wide array of mental health communication concepts, such as information seeking, message effectiveness perceptions, self‐stigma, and mental health literacy. We next move to issues related to the global dominance of digital information platforms. In part III, Kylie Woodman and Rene Weber, Fakhra Jabeen and colleagues, Nancy Lau and colleagues, and Jolynn Dellinger unpack the dangers of digital media for mental health and how their potential can be leveraged for improving mental health. In part IV, Crystal Barksdale and colleagues, Frances Griffith and Sydney Simmons, Sabrina Menezes and Gregory Guldner, and Laura Marciano and colleagues speak to the complex question of what needs to be done to ensure that mental health messaging improves mental health outcomes in special populations, given the strong causal effects of structural factors on mental illness and well‐documented evidence that health message campaigns can exacerbate mental health disparities and communication inequalities.

In part V, Xun Zhu and colleagues, Ashley Johnson and colleagues, Tara Muschetto and Jason Siegel, and Miranda Twiss and colleagues discuss various ways messages can inadvertently increase stigma of mental illness and alternative message approaches that can reduce stigma. In part VI, Christopher Falco and Benjamin Rosenberg, Thomas Niederkrotenthaler and colleagues, Tasha Straszewski and Jason Siegel, Marco Yzer and Xuan Zhu, and Jason Siegel and Cara Tan review research on message strategies that offer exciting potential for improving mental health outcomes. Part VII includes essays by Teresa Thompson, Wenhao Dai and Dolores Albarracín, Jenna Reno and colleagues, and Bill Crano in which they reflect on their prolific and essential work in domains other than mental health and advance ideas lessons learned from their work that can be applied to mental health communication. For the final chapter, we accepted the challenge of highlighting how all the chapters in the book can come together to offer a helpful path ahead for mental health communication efforts. We proudly cite every chapter in the book and provide one of many recommendations that can come from the culmination of the Handbook’s chapters.

This brief overview of the chapters in this Handbook of Mental Health Communication illustrates the wide range of questions that must be addressed when one considers developing mental health messages. Some questions directly ask about message aspects, whereas others ask about contextual, psychopathological, and other noncommunication issues. A comprehensive picture of the mental health communication landscape emerges when all these chapters are put together. To maximize the integration of ideas, we also asked all authors to include their thoughts on what their review meant as advice for those who want to use messaging for mental health promotion. This handbook's wealth of insights is not the final word about what we can do to optimize and safeguard mental health communication. It is a beginning. We hope this handbook will lead to a conversation among scholars, practitioners, and others for whom mental health and mental illness are essential, sparking interest in new research. This will ultimately converge in a significantly strengthened knowledge base on mental health communication.

Acknowledgments

Mental health is close to our hearts. We believe this handbook can make a real contribution to efforts that improve the lives of people with mental illness. For that reason alone, working on this project has been gratifying, humbling, and energizing. We have been similarly thrilled by the opportunity to work with and be supported by such an amazing group of people. Our collaborative work has underscored how significant an interaction effect can be.

Considerable credit goes to Nicole Allen at Wiley and Dr. Teri Thompson, founding editor of the journal Health Communication. Our collective paths crossed thanks to them. We are thankful to them for their reliably strong support throughout this entire project.

We are filled with gratitude for the expert contributions from all authors, who generously contributed their time and wisdom because they believed in the importance of this book's mission.

We wish to acknowledge the assistance of Zach Buttram, Yuming Fang, and Noel Perez. Their careful attention to detail and positive demeanor greatly helped the preparation of the book materials during the final stages of the project.

We owe a debt of gratitude to our departments for their support. We also are hugely thankful for the support we received from so many of our colleagues, whose helpful thoughts and patience when we made them listen to our long updates had a significant effect on the success of this project. We particularly recognize Dr. Rebekah Nagler and Dr. Jen Lueck. We also acknowledge the deep respect we have for the guidance we have received over the years from our mentors, Dr. Marty Fishbein and Dr. Bill...

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 31.3.2025
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Sozialwissenschaften ► Kommunikation / Medien
• Themenwelt: Sozialwissenschaften ► Politik / Verwaltung
• Themenwelt: Sozialwissenschaften ► Soziologie
• Schlagworte: mental health communication guide • mental health communication reference • mental health communication research • mental health communication textbook • mental health messaging design • mental health messaging research • mental health messaging textbook
• ISBN-13: 9781394179893 / 9781394179893