ABSTRACT
This chapter describes the photo-based profile-building exercise that occurred as part of a research process which took place over the course of a school year in a secondary school in England. The chapter explain the challenges in broaching the topic of mental illness be put forward along with an explanation of why it was felt visual approaches could offer a fruitful alternative. Neil Pickering proposes that the concepts or ideas of mental illness, and the precise labels beneath that umbrella like schizophrenia or ADHD, are deeply ingrained in the language, institutions and constitutions of the UK as well as throughout the western world. Pickering describes popular factual accounts of the experiences of people who are mentally ill, including well-known films, novels and autobiographies. Pickering draws attention to the way in the stories in the media have brought terms like paranoid, schizophrenia and post traumatic stress disorder into the public eye and made these familiar expression.
