Lost between the lines: Mental Health in Media

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Mental health in Mainstream Media

Recently, I have come across articles in the newspapers with very strange headlines “Bengaluru wife ends life after husband fails to get her chocolate “ and “Angered over haircut, teenage boy jumps to death from 16th floor in Maharashtra’s Bhayandar”. I am pretty sure that you must have come across such sensational news articles while scrolling through the internet.

At first glance, I found them silly and quite flabbergasted by such news items. Then I started thinking as to why would anyone choose death over haircut or chocolate? Have we lost basic thinking capabilities, reasoning skills and impulse control that we think it’s better to die if we don’t get our favourite food?

My experience with dealing with patients coming with self-harm behaviours made me reflect on such news pieces in a different light because even for patients who have lost all reality contact do not consider suicide as the first option. For many, it’s the last option after they tried multiple things which did not work and they have lost all hope that things can get better. An act of self harm is a call for help for many so even the most trivial interventions, even random ones can pull away people from the final act. Our basic instinct is survival so suicide is something that goes against our basic nature hence is a complex psychological process. There are also not a single but multiple factors-psychological, social, interpersonal- which push someone into doing something of such nature.

However most media coverage these days is to capture maximum attention and generate TRPs which translate to more revenues. It’s a well known fact that we tend to pay more attention to negative news than positive ones, hence newspapers sensationalise such incidents. In these attempts to capture maximum audience and generate profits, serious mental health issues such suicide get lost between lines. When I read the articles, a few lines about the incidents were written without any mention as to why would anyone want to die because of a bad haircut or chocolates? There are never any input by mental health professionals on such issues and there’s no follow up articles so that we are just left with a piece of random information about some random person death and soon we miss another opportunity to discuss about mental health matters.



Why Communication Matters

It’s a sad but true fact that we do not want to discuss mental health problems till we, ourselves or a close family member or friend starts suffering from them and we face consequences because of their illness. A lot of the inhibition has to do with stigma around mental health and our false sense of belief that we are invincible. It is important to keep in mind that anyone can have mental illness at any point of time, irrespective of our family, genetics, income level, social status, gender, caste, race and ethnicity and physical health. However the sooner we start a healthy conversation about mental illnesses and health, we may have better chances of knowing the treatments and how to deal with them, but if we keep on sweeping them under the rug and remain in denial, it will remain just a few lines in a hastily written news article.


Dr. Suhasini Das, MD

Consultant Psychiatrist

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