Madness, Power and the Media: Class, Gender and Race in Popular Representations of Mental Distress

by Stephen Harper

Questioning the psychiatric construction of mental distress as 'illness', and challenging existing studies of media stigmatization, Stephen Harper argues that today's media images of mental distress are often sympathetic, yet tend to reproduce the sexist, classist, racist and individualist ideologies of contemporary capitalism.

Genres: Nonfiction

244 pages, Hardcover

First published July 30, 2009

About the author

Senior Lecturer in Media Studies at the University of Portsmouth, UK. His research interests span political and social issues in British television, critical theory and cultural geopolitics. He has written academic articles on a wide range of subjects including British television drama and documentary, dramatic representations of war and media representations of mental distress. He is also the author of Madness, Power and the Media (Palgrave, 2009) and Beyond the Left: The Communist Critique of the Media (Zer0 Books, 2012).