ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the role of the media in communicating risk within the context of mental ill health. At present the American and European diagnostic manuals for mental ill health cite some four hundred categories. It is also a sobering thought to know that in the history of these manuals only one category has ever been removed from it, homosexuality. The critique of this diagnostic approach from within the mental health system has likewise been ongoing, gaining momentum at certain times, and linked to socio-cultural changes in our generic understanding of life rather than of mental ill health as such. This highlights how the media communicates risks as well as what it does communicate in the case of mental illness. It is only in reflecting on mental illness through artistic achievements such as poetry, novels, films, painting that the media allows itself at times to recognise the insight which mental ill health offers to humanity.
