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Representation of Mental Disabilities in the Media

Term: 04/2014 to 09/2015

Project management and coordination: AP Dr phil.  Hendrik Trescher

Implementing institutions: Institute for Special Needs Education at Goethe University,

Research assistant(s): Stefanie Schneider, BA

Financing: Institute for Special Needs Education at Goethe University,

Project description:

In discourses, representations of objects, persons or facts are produced that influence public perception and contribute to the formation of opinion.  In this context, media can be understood as a venue for staging public discourses, each media enacting a specific staging of its respective subject matter. The public 'image' produced in this way in turn involves corresponding practices. With regard to the subject matter at hand, this means that it is assumed that the media portrayal of people with mental disabilities has an impact on how they are encountered in public. The question of interest here, then, is to what extent the representation of people with mental disabilities, for example in mainstream magazines or newspapers, contributes to a (re)production of disability-specific practices. A total of 20 print and online media from the segments 'quality press' (daily/weekly newspapers), 'tabloid press' (e.g. Brigitte, Super Illu) and 'magazines' (e.g. NEON, Spiegel) were examined using sequence-analytical methods. The focus of analysis thereby lay on the question of how people with mental disabilities are portrayed in the respective media.