Thursday’s Otago Daily Times article about a fatal eight car crash in Auckland was grossly stigmatising for people with mental illness said a spokesperson for Standard Nine, an Otago mental health consumer NGO.
“It was unnecessary and pointless to headline that the driver in the crash was a “mental patient”.
The implication of the headline was clearly that the man’s mental illness had something to do with the crash. That was sensationalist and uninformed speculation.” said Standard Nine.
The article reported police as saying that the man was a “bipolar mental patient on medication”.
Thousands of people have a diagnosis of bipolar disorder said Standard Nine. They may include your shopkeeper, your lawyer or your school teacher.
The article stigmatises those people when they are actually far more likely to be the victims of violence than the perpetrators.
Standard Nine said that the greatest risk factor for violence in our community is being male.
A more useful headline may have been “Fatal crash driver was male”.