Wow @outlander I did something yesterday and I wanted to start a thread with something like this but you've said it better:
Last weekend, there was another huge tragedy in Western Australia and I wrote on my Facebook page that it wasn't just the tragedy that was terrible but how the reporters reported on it by showing a young man with a photo of him looking like a gangster. I questioned why the newspapers didn't show a photo of him in his school uniform as he went to a good Catholic College for high school but only wrote about him negatively. The reporters think ...'oh this is the too hard basket,' and dont research the story on his past properly. The reporters wrote a couple of times 'psychotic,' and I questioned who actually knows what that means besides grabbing a pamphlet from the Gps which writes a whole lot of words people would find it hard to understand.
I then wrote an email to my friend who works in the papers in Western Australia and asked
1. why doesn't someone interview someone with lived experience and their loved ones what having a psychotic episode is really like and the frustration loved ones feel when hospitals in the emergency dept. ignore them.
2. if reporters feel " people suffering times of mental health is a very complex situation.... why dont they just write about it?
3. write about self-care, getting support and what the first point of call should be as soon as diagnosed for both the client and the carer's loved ones and I gave my thoughts on who that should be.
I wrote about the word empathy. Where would society be if we didn't show empathy?
