Soaps help fight mental health stigma

Anti-stigma campaigner and Emmerdale script adviser Lawrence Butterfield, second right, at the Mind media awards 2012. He is pictured with members of the Emmerdale cast and crew and awards host Stephen Fry.

Researchers for campaign group Time to Change spent three months analysing TV dramas such as Hollyoaks and Eastenders and big budget series like Channel 4’s Homeland, and found that the way mental health issues are portrayed on screen is becoming more realistic and is more likely to encourage people to seek help for their own problems.

More than half of viewers, 54 per cent, said that seeing a well-known character portrayed as having a mental health problem improved their understanding of what it involved.

Almost half. 48 per cent, said it helped change their opinion about who can develop such problems and nearly a third said they had discussed storylines with friends or family.

Mental health issues featured more often in plot lines than five years ago but there were still some “simplistic portrayals” and misinformation, the report said.

One anti-stigma campaigner, who used his own experiences suffering from depression to advise the Emmerdale production team, said programme makers had a responsibility to be both sensitive and realistic in their portrayal of mental illness.

Lawrence Butterfield, 54, of Guisborough, North Yorkshire, advised researchers on a storyline featuring Zak Dingle, who was diagnosed with psychotic depression in 2012. It won a Mind Media Award for the accurate portrayal of the condition.

Mr Butterfield, who is a mental health nurse and a media advisor for Time to Change, said more should be done to tackle negative language associated with mental health used on television.

“You wouldn’t use a homophobic or racist word loosely on TV, but it still seems acceptable for celebrities to use words like ‘psycho’ or ‘lunatic’,” he said. “Thankfully, TV dramas and soaps have the chance to show mental health issues responsibly and positively promote an anti-stigma message.”

Kate Oates, producer of Emmerdale, said mental health needed “demystifying” and soaps had an “enormous responsibility” in helping to change perceptions,

She said: “We can give people a voice who are not normally heard and we can also give people a different perspective on an issue.”

The report comes as one of Coronation Street’s most well-known characters, Steve McDonald, is about to be diagnosed with depression. Producer Stuart Blackburn said it was a “challenge” for the writers to show that while he may be suffering, the character has not changed for good.

He said: “We’ve got to find a way to tell the truth about this, warts and all, and entertain the audience.”