Selected Black magazines' coverage of mental illness, 2000-2007

On August 26, 2001 then U.S. Surgeon General David Satcher released a report titled, Mental Health: Culture, Race, and Ethnicity, which detailed the mental healthcare system's failure to adequately serve minority populations. As a result of that report, our study emerged from and is founded on three premises: 1) most Americans obtain mental illness information from the media, 2) historically, Black media have served an important role in the Black community, and 3) the media are particularly adept at both reaching and influencing their targeted audiences. Relying on media advocacy theory, which emphasizes the social dimensions of a given problem as compared with the individual dimensions, we content analyze selected Black magazines' (Black Enterprise, Ebony, Essence, and Jet) coverage of mental illness from 2000-2007 to determine whether the magazines' mental illness coverage increased in the years following the report. Primary variables examined include: mental illnesses featured; the overall tone (pessimistic or optimistic) of the magazines' mental illness coverage; overarching themes, e.g., culture, stigma, signs and symptoms, treatment options, support systems, family conflict, role of religion and faith of the magazines' coverage; articles' main character(s) and main narrator(s); claimsmakers, that is, those who are quoted and thus placed in a position to control the meaning of mental illness; whether mental illness is more often framed in an episodic (event oriented, specific, and concrete) or thematic (issue oriented, general and abstract) context; and whether the mental illness problems and solutions are more often framed as an individual or societal issues.