Responsible Mental Health Reporting: Tips from Journalists

Provide Real Solutions in Your Mental Health Journalism. Covering mental health is challenging. Journalists Judith Warner, Stephanie Foo and Rhitu Chatterjee share their tips for reporting with care.
by Hope Kahn, National Press Foundation
“Everything with mental health in our country is a massive structural failure,” said author and journalist Judith Warner. That’s why covering mental health as a journalist with care is crucial. Warner, author and journalist Stephanie Foo and NPR health correspondent Rhitu Chatterjee, spoke to NPF’s Covering Workplace Mental Health Fellows about how journalists can make their reporting more nuanced and impactful.
3 TAKEAWAYS:
➀ Report on the whole person
Foo encourages journalists to not just interview people who are struggling, but to also interview people who are actively healing and report on what has helped them.
“When I am writing about mental health … some things that I’m really trying to look out for are nuance, joy, trying to include the voices of people who do possess these mental health conditions and have them speak about the experience from their first-person perspective to make them not victims or pathologize them,” Foo said.
Being a trauma-informed reporter also means adjusting to your source’s pace, not only your newsroom’s.
Chatterjee spoke about a story she covered on a critical-care nurse who went missing and died - and how she tried to talk to one of his roommates, who was also a critical-care nurse.
“It was very clear this man wanted to get the story out, was hoping I’d be a responsible reporter to talk to, but … he was still deep in grief and trauma,” she said.
Chatterjee was able to do a multi-layered story, telling about what nurses are facing around the country, as well as a story about them coming together to mobilize and push hospital systems to better address the factors causing burnout and mental healthcare issues.
➁ Bring Healthy Skepticism to Statistics
“Data is the currency of truth now … but you have to do your due diligence to know enough about statistics to be able to read them critically,” Warner said. “What’s ended up happening a lot is that the statistics that take off and become storylines that are repeated over and over again, very often, are those that sort of reinforce what people already think.”
Warner urges journalists to have a “stable of experts” who they can go to when a story is data-heavy.
“If you’re covering one study, and you call the author first and ask them, ‘Who are the other people in the field who weren’t involved in the study, that are really at the forefront of this field?’ … [you start to] get a pool of people.”
➂ Provide Useful Resources
Many mental health stories include resources at the end. While this is better than not, journalists should double-check their resources as they would any other content.
“One thing that I find incredibly frustrating … [is] when there is a list of resources for getting help, often it’ll be like the website of a government agency or the website of a huge nonprofit,” Warner said. “It just compounds whatever anxiety or sense of desperation that you’re already feeling. If it’s possible and there is space for it, I think it’s worth trying to do the extra steps to give people help that’s actually helpful.”
Chatterjee recommends suggesting organizations like local chapters of the National Alliance on Mental Illness or parent or support groups where they can receive a quicker, more personal response.
In her book “What My Bones Know,” Foo laid out a “personally trusted, tried, and true roadmap for healing.” She said as she comes across resources, either in her reporting, in life or even scrolling Instagram - such as organizations that provide free or discounted therapy to minoritized communities, activists or journalists - she saves them to share.
Speakers: Stephanie Foo, Author, Freelance Journalist and Lecturer
Rhitu Chatterjee, Health Correspondent, NPR
Judith Warner, Freelance Author & Journalist; Adjunct Lecturer, Georgetown University
Summary, transcript and resources: nationalpress.org/topic/menta...
This video was produced within the Evelyn Y. Davis studios.