The people gathered in the West Cumbrian living room don’t want to reveal their exact location other than that it is in a part of the region directly affected by the multiple murders in June, when a local man, Derrick Bird, drove around the area shooting people.
They fear that being identified could bring negative attention. All of those present — including a woman with a diagnosis of bipolar disorder and another who is a carer for someone with the condition — are involved with a local peer-support mental health group.
Until the shootings last month, the group got together regularly — but since then, members have avoided gathering in places known to be used by people with mental health conditions. “A few of us have met in the pub or people’s living rooms since,” says group member Jane White. “We didn’t want to draw any attention to ourselves.”
The reason is partly down to the media speculation about Bird’s mental health and newspaper headlines such as “Psycho cabbie’s rampage on CCTV” in the aftermath of the tragedy. It left some in the group — many of whom travel from across the county to attend — concerned about being stigmatised ‘by association”, White says.
“In the days after [the murders] I’d look at the newspapers and see the headlines speculating about mental illness or calling [Bird] a ‘psycho’ and it made me afraid.” White says she is anxious the media coverage has fostered antagonism towards those suffering from mental illness and, as a result, may make people with a diagnosis wary of being open about their circumstances.
“It’s already difficult in small, tightknit communities to be open about having a mental health condition,” she says. “I’m worried that people’s fear of being labelled will mean they don’t come forward for the support they need.”
The West Cumbria support group is small — just 10 to 12 people attend regularly — but it is “vital” to reducing isolation and helping people when they need to talk to others who understand, White says. “I came to think over the years that real progress was being made in destigmatising mental illness, but watching how the media reacted [to the murders] and then worrying about how I might be regarded as a result, it feels like we are being set back.”
Sue Dixon, a carer involved with the group, worries that efforts to educate the public about living with a mental health condition could be undermined by “irresponsible” reporting and that people diagnosed with a mental illness will be regarded as “potential” violent criminals.
A spokesperson for the charity MDF, which supports people with bipolar disorder and runs the West Cumbria group, says: “It sounds like careless press reporting of this tragedy has set back by a decade the hard work of our members to gain acceptance in the local community. The stigma of mental illness is bad enough without this. The last thing our members need is to be tainted by some entirely false association with a mass murderer.
“Research shows there is no link between bipolar disorder and violence, but the media always tends to give the impression that anyone with mental health problems is a ‘mad axeman’.” A spokesperson for the mental health charity Mind, which has made funds available to its Cumbria branches in case extra help is needed, says there is no evidence Bird had ever been in touch with mental health services.
“He was branded ‘crazed’, ‘loony’, ‘madman’, derogatory terms so commonly used to describe mental health problems,” she says. “The persistent misuse of mental health language by some media outlets does more than cause offence, it can have serious repercussions for how [people] are treated by society, from trivial name calling to hate crime.”
In a debate on the tragedy last week in the House of Commons, local MP Jamie Reed was critical about how the murders were reported. “In such situations, there is no place for the media’s invented exclusives, its prurience and voyeurism, its mawkish brutality and its cold-blooded pursuit of profit at the expense of the families of those most affected,” he said. “One price we pay for a free press is its freedom to write such misleading and opinionated bile.”
Philip Price, a coordinator for the West Cumbria group, agrees the media have a lot to answer for and says more needs to be done to educate not only the public but also the people who report the news to them. “I understand that we are in an age of 24-hour news and that, just by definition, it is harder for journalists to put the legwork in that is needed for a story like this. But there is a point at which it’s about decency and using common sense.”
News organisations, he suggests, have a responsibility to train staff better on mental health issues. It is a view shared by Reed, who told MPs in last week’s debate that he would be writing to the National Union of Journalists and the Press Complaints Commission (PCC) to push for professional codes of practice to be improved significantly.
A PCC spokesperson says it has received a “fairly small” number of complaints, which so far did not appear to demonstrate any breach of the “editor’s code”, but “if the commission determines that the press has broken any of the code’s rules, it will, of course, make that very clear”.
PCC guidance on reporting mental illness has been revised and updated since it was introduced in 1991. Since the Cumbrian shootings took place, the PCC has been in regular contact with local police and health authorities explaining how it might assist, the spokesperson says.
White says the coverage by some of the media in the days after the tragedy has made many people with mental health conditions feel “targeted”. [But] “we will have our next meeting,” she says. The test, White says, is whether in the months ahead people in the area begin to feel comfortable about seeking the support on offer. —