The Media, Mental Illness, and Race

Doug Hartmann on July 23, 2012

A provocative, sociologically-minded piece on the mainstream media ignoring mental illness among African Americans appeared late last week in the Milwaukee Community Journal: http://www.communityjournal.net/mainstream-media-tend-to-ignore-blacks-mental-health-problems/. It includes key commentary from Dr. Leonard, a sociologist in the Department of Critical Culture, Gender, and Race Studies at Washington State University and author of After Artest: The NBA and the Assault on Blackness (featured on our Reading List a bit back).

“Even when the topic is more about black celebrity than race, mental illness, particularly in famous athletes, is viewed as “evidence of a criminal character. … Media go immediately to focusing on the purported pathologies of the players themselves and don’t want to see what the broader context is,” Leonard says. “The history of race and mental health is a history of racism and the white medical establishment demonizing and criminalizing the black community through writing about their ‘abnormal personalities’ and being ‘crazy.’
“That history plays out in mainstream media coverage, but it also affects public discussions about mental health because it has so often been used to justify exclusion, segregation and inequality” in mental health treatment for African-Americans.”

Pro-Social Peer Pressure

Doug Hartmann on January 19, 2012
Join the Club CoverSociologists love groups and are fascinated by social organization and collective action. Indeed, some define sociology as the study of things we do together. Yet, in a culture that celebrates individualism, the power and importance of the collective is often ignored, misunderstood, or believed to be negative. There is no better example of this than the common-place notion of “peer pressure” which is almost always assumed to be a bad thing.

Cutting against this is Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Tina Rosenberg‘s recent W.W. Norton book Join the Club: How Peer Pressure Can Transform the World.  It is not a particularly scholarly book but it is wonderfully written, well-thought, and researched (Rosenberg draws upon academic research from the fields of public health, communications and social psychology, and microeconomics and cites sociologists including Robert Wuthnow and Robert Bellah)—and thoroughly sociological.

Rosenberg was interviewed about her book this week by Minnesota Public Radio’s Marianne Combs. One of the great points she makes in both the book and the interview is that information is not the key to changing behavior. Motivation is. And motivation, in her view, comes from identity, which comes primarily from those around you. Happily for the world, this means peer pressure can be a pro-social force for positive change.