Despite increased global awareness and advocacy, societal stigma around mental illnesses remains deeply entrenched, globally. Across communities and cultures, individuals living with mental health conditions continue to face misunderstanding, marginalisation, and exclusion: a reality that often worsens their symptoms, limits access to care and diminishes the chances of receiving a proper treatment plan. 

While we have made enormous leaps in the past two decades alone, discrimination against people living with a mental illness has a long history. What communities and sometimes health care workers themselves overlook, is that this type of discrimination carries real world consequences for people living with a mental illness, including discouraging the pursuit of treatment for fear of being labelled “mentally ill”. 

Says Professor Christine Lochner, a professor in the department of psychiatry overseeing the Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences’ Mental Health Information Centre at Stellenbosch University: “This type of discrimination is not born in a vacuum. It is shaped, reinforced and perpetuated by various social forces, including cultural ideas that mental illness reflects spiritual weaknesses.”

Discussions about mental health and mental ill-health is often excluded from school curricula, which results in low mental health literacy: “This makes it especially difficult for individuals to recognise symptoms and fosters misconceptions such as that mental illnesses are always linked to erratic or violent behaviour,” says Lochner.

Emerging research shows that news reporting and the media’s portrayal of mental illnesses still contributes to the very stigma mental health professionals and advocates work so hard to dismantle. 

While there has been great progress over time, mental illnesses are often still stigmatised in global and South African media, often surfacing only in the context of high-profile incidents or crimes. Despite evidence showing that individuals with mental illnesses are far more likely to be victims than perpetrators of crime a study published in 2024 revealing that bias in media framing can influence the criminal justice system, where those needing psychiatric care are too often detained or incarcerated instead of receiving appropriate treatment.

“It is true that we continue to bear witness to reductive and sensationalist descriptors or inappropriate images in our very own media,” says Professor Lizette Rabe, a founding member of the South African mental health non-profit entity, the Ithemba Foundation.  Rabe, who is also emeritus Professor at Stellenbosch University’s Department of Journalism, has advocated for careful language use in the context of mental illnesses specifically, in a bid to reduce stigma – both in the news and in homes.  “We need to stem the stigma tide with urgency. In the face of the rise in young people diagnosed with a mental illness and the recent lawsuits brought against artificial intelligence (AI) companies following the tragic suicides of two teenagers in the USA.” 

Since the time of Hippocrates, mental illness stigma has persisted; it lingers in our communities and is often still echoed in the media we consume, subtly shaping perceptions and deepening misunderstanding. To dismantle it, we must confront cultural biases, reform harmful narratives, and ensure that (traditional) media works with concerted and higher levels of responsibility. Moreover, in the field of mental illnesses specifically, we have to find a way to ensure that new technologies like AI is deployed with mandatory ethical safeguards, which includes training it on inclusive, culturally sensitive and accurate data which, in the case of mental illnesses, must be designed to detect and avoid the amplification of stigma.