Watch your thoughts; they become words.  Watch your words; they become actions.  Watch your actions; they become habits.  Watch your habits; they become your character.  Watch your character; it becomes your destiny.

                                                                    Author Unknown

Mass Media

Consumers are reached by television, newspapers, magazines, medical newsletters, billboards, radio, pamphlets, and mailings of various kinds. With approximately 4800 journals indexed on MEDLINE (2005), containing more than 9 million abstracts, the sheer mass of emerging research is overwhelming.   Unfortunately, there is a gap between the wealth of expanding information and the quality of the public’s health knowledge and practice, partly because of the difficulty of dispensing this information to the public.

The editors of the New England Journal of Medicine noted that "the problem of [communicating health] is not in the research itself but in the way it is interpreted for the public" (Angell & Kassirer, 1994).    We rely on the skills of journalists to facilitate the flow of reliable and valid medical research to the public at large.    Assuming that a journalist is reporting medical information accurately, there are still several barriers to improving the informative value of medical journalism such as lack of time, space and knowledge; competition for space and audience; difficulties with terminology; problems finding and using sources; as well as problems with editors and commercialism (Coulter, 2003). Given that public perceptions continue to be greatly influenced by the media it seems necessary to assure the accuracy of disseminated information (Wakefield, 2003; Mutz, 1989).

The media strive to meet the increasing public demands for health information. Often health journalism goes far beyond the available data.  For example, a headline in Time appeared beside the picture of a stark ambiguous face with vacant eyes, that read “Suicide check: Advances in bio-psychiatry may lead to lab tests for self-destructive behavior and other mental disorders” (Gorman, 1994).   The article described the “promising development” of a potential lab test for suicide.  It pointed out that the vast percentage of people who commit suicide show brain changes at autopsy.  However, what was missing was the percentage of people who never attempt suicide who possess those same brain changes.  The article further emphasized the “hot new field of biological psychiatry” and that what once was the purview of priests and analysts, is now a frontier for psychiatrists who use “blood tests, brain scans and spinal taps” to distinguish among types of depression and schizophrenia.

             Beyond health related information media reports contribute to an expanding biologicalization of all elements of human experience.  For example, the National Geographic (1995) published an article titled, “Quiet Miracles of the Brain”, where former National Institutes of Health pharmacologist Candice Pert described emotions as, “…neuropeptitdes attaching to receptors and stimulating an electrical charge on neurons.”  In that article Pert did not account for the influence of verbal communities that teach us to label emotions as we do.  It is plausible that some basic emotions such as fear and rage amount to little more than genetically programmed responses.  But the vast majority of emotions labeled - embarrassment, anticipation, shyness, perplexity, etc., are likely learned, taught to us by the verbal community (Skinner, 1974).  We have to be cautious in reading the media as they report more on the biological basis of behavior as this practice can shift perception in an extreme direction.

Newsweek (2003), a popular magazine with a circulation of 4 million worldwide and 3 million in the United States alone, (and a readership likely well beyond that) reported how an amygdala, “…perceives a threat…”   However, amygdala’s do not explain why one person may scream at the sight of a spider, while another keeps spiders as pets.  It is in volume that these styles of statements are disseminated to the public.  If one believes the criticisms of the biological causation model previously discussed, then it is logical to conclude that articles in this format could be construed as misleading the majority of readers, given that they are usually not usually sitting down to think critically about behavioral sciences, rather they are likely just skimming a magazine absorbing the information as truth.  Read more commentary on how the individual has a preference in believing that what is going on mental health wise is biologically caused.

Donna M. Midkiff, PsyD