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what is the general idea of how crime is portrayed in modern media?

crimes which dominate media are murder and interpersonal violence with styles of depiction, description or reporting which are highly judgemental and make considerable use of stereotypes and assumptions (philo, mclaughlin and henderson, 1996).

however, while murder is the criminal act that creates greatest apparent public anxiety about crime in western societies, it is in fact the crime with the lowest risk of occurrence compared to other crimes (mcintyre, 1967; office for national statistics, 2015) and hence is hugely over-represented in media reporting.

this focus therefore reflects concern not with actual but perceived risk or danger.

what are the mcnaughtan rules?

in 1843 daniel mcnaughtan tried to kill the british prime minister robert peel, but succeeded only in killing his secretary edward drummond.

mcnaughtan was acquitted of the crime after the trial was stopped because he was deemed insane, and he spent the rest of his life in bethlem and then broadmoor criminal asylum.

the resulting public outcry led by newspapers over him ‘getting off’ led to the house of lords issuing a ruling on the interpretation of a plea of insanity in mitigation of commission of a crime: the jurors ought to be told in all cases that every man is to be presumed to be sane, and to possess a sufficient degree of reason to be responsible for his crimes, until the contrary be proved to their satisfaction; and that to establish a defence on the ground of insanity, it must be clearly proved that, at the time of the committing of the act, the party accused was labouring under such a defect of reason, from disease of the mind, as not to know the nature and quality of the act he was doing; or, if he did know it, that he did not know he was doing what was wrong (8 ER 718, [1843] UKHL J16 para 28).

although based on a british criminal case, mcnaughtan rules have been adopted in the US and many other english-speaking judicial systems.

however, a critical decision for courts has become the implementation of the last two clauses, and in particular the question of whether the defendant knew what they were doing was wrong.

how has the depiction of madness in films and fictional dramas been analysed?

otto wahl (1992, 1995), stephen harper (2009) and michael birch (2012) have produced detailed and compendious analyses of research evidence on the depiction of madness in films and broadcast/webcast drama.

wahl (1995), in a chapter tellingly entitled ‘murder and mayhem’, documents over 150 films released between 1985 and 1995 which either had a major character with an identified mental problem in the plot description or had a title including a term connoting mental health problems.

the chapter discusses how the majority of these films position those with mental problems at the centre of the violence, producing unpredictable and extreme behaviour which has dire consequences for the ‘normal’ people it is inflicted on.

birch (2012) carries this analysis forward to modern films, and discussed the development of the ‘not quite right’ personality who, rather than being the obviously maniacal and psychopathically homicidal protagonists of early films, poses more danger because abnormality can be concealed and danger is hidden.

birch argues that alfred hitchcock’s 1960 film psycho began a whole sub-genre of this kind. in most of this film madness is viewed as illness, albeit an irretrievable and highly dangerous one, with a view of norman bates by the end of the movie as utterly transformed and deranged.

echoing nineteenth-century psychiatric ideas, hitchcock also used a powerful ‘contagion’ view of this ‘disease’ of madness – that those who are sane and well can become infected by prolonged contact with the mad, and their own health and welfare is at risk from that very contact.

how has the horror crime genre displayed madness?

the horror crime genre which began in the 1970s focused in particular on one area where ‘mad’ and ‘bad’ were not seen as mutually exclusive – the notion of evil.

here is a state of madness which is extreme because the person concerned is neither normal nor rational, and they are focused on intentional malevolence to others with full knowledge of what they do.

a good example is the nightmare on elm street series. these feature a protagonist freddy kruger who was a child murderer killed by the parents of his victims in the town where they all lived, and who comes back supernaturally to seek revenge for his death.

there is no doubt in the films that kruger is ‘mad’ in both life and death and, to underline how complete this is, it is part of the story that he is the offspring of a mental health nurse gang-raped by mentally ill patients.

by this plot device kruger’s evil is actually rooted in his genesis by ‘mad’ men – and note how the ‘treatment’ context is positioned in this story device as one open to exploitation by the mentally ill, as freddy’s mother is a mental health nurse raped by her patients.

risk, responsibility and retribution weave through this series of films and the genre to which they belong.

so too does the proposition that particular forms of ‘madness’ must be at the heart of any crimes of enormous magnitude, any outrageous crime, because no one sane could contemplate doing them, whatever the provocation or reasons.

how have labelling theories and othering changed cinematic representations of mental health?

the development of anti-psychiatric and sociological ‘labelling theories’ in the 1960s and 1970s contributed to some change in cinematic representations of mental health – one of the most famous is one flew over the cuckoo’s nest, made in 1975.

but wahl (1995, p. 38) points out that even though it won five academy awards for its ground-breaking sympathetic depiction of mental illness, the film makers did not resist the push towards ‘othering ’–making clear that those with mental illness are very different in appearance from normal people as a sign for much deeper differences.

the producers of the movie had wanted to use actual patients from oregon state hospital for a large number of walk-on parts needed in the movie, but this was rejected because ‘real patients did not look distinct enough to depict mental patients on screen’. they had to recruit actors and spend a great deal of effort making them look unusual to make sure it was clear they were ‘mad’.

the fear and othering of those with mental illness makes them far more likely to be represented as aggressors than victims in most media representations.

for example, birch (2012) cites a survey of day-time soap opera episodes which featured characters with mental health problems, finding that 83% had the character committing an act of violence and 13% had them as victims of acts of violence.

yet in the real world, where social injustices abound, these statistics should be reversed – those diagnosed with a mental illness are far more likely to be victims of violence than to commit it.

this reversal of reality is grounded in the over-representation in dramas of ‘mad’ mental illness like psychosis or psychopathic conditions, rather than the ‘sad’ conditions of depressions, anxieties, phobias, addictions, obsessions and compulsions

how does jewkes view the portrayal of madness in media portrayals?

in media and crime, yvonne jewkes (2011b) notes: ‘news reports about crime are replete with the language of otherness; people who offend do so because “they” are not like “us”’.

we suggest that this is doubly so in the case of mentally disordered offenders because as blackman and walkerdine (2001) observe, ‘the mad and the bad’ occupy a symbolic space in the popular press because they threaten the ‘boundaries by which the distinctions between good and evil, mad and bad, and rational and irrational are usually drawn’.

blackman and walkerdine also point out that media portrayals about the ‘mad and the bad’ act as repositories for cultural fears about the capacity we all have to commit evil acts. at the same time, they also tend to offer reassuring distance by portrayal of them as the actions of pathological loners, individual and uniquely evil monsters, who will be taught the lessons of culpability.

jewkes’ (2011b) work on media and crime also points to a transition from a nineteenth-century view of culpability, as directly related to the gravity of a crime and the crime itself, to one in which the gravity and significance of crime is produced through mediated constructions of who the perpetrators ‘are’ and who the criminals ‘are’.

this might be graphically illustrated by the treatment of children when perpetrators (accounts of children who murder are most often focused on their pure evil or perversion), or when victims (where children are positioned as innocent, angelic and unwitting).

when women are victims of crime they are innocent if conforming to norms for conventional femininity (mothers, wives or sexually inactive and domestically focused), or culpable in their own victimisation (for example, prostitutes or those active outside the home in ways, at times and in places considered unfeminine).

in particular, jewkes (2011b) examines the use of processes of stigmatisation and sentimentalisation in media portrayals of women, whether they are in the role of perpetrator or victim, as the result of social and judicial contexts which are profoundly patriarchal.

how do news media show representations of mad or bad in violent crime?

news media, especially the hyper-moralistic british tabloids, speak to an imagined audience: addressed as known and understood to have shared understandings, experiences, social morals and values as the consumers of that source.

tabloids often promote themselves as the vox populi of their readers. newspapers and news media typically report and explain to their readers following the five journalistic ‘W’s that every trainee journalist is taught to be the basics of any story: who, when, where, what and why.

however, extreme and violent crime often disrupts this cosy communication because the ‘what’ and the ‘why’ parts of a story and are often contested and contradictory when issues of state of mind are involved.

a case in point concerns british serial killer peter sutcliffe, known as the yorkshire ripper, who was responsible for 13 murders and seven attempted murders of women.

at his 1981 trial, which had saturation news media coverage, sutcliffe was diagnosed as suffering from paranoid schizophrenia, which was rejected by the prosecution (after initially accepting it).

sutcliffe was found guilty and sentenced to multiple life terms in prison, before being sent to broadmoor hospital in 1983.

in the court of public opinion, UK tabloids mounted a campaign to resist his ‘cushy’ imprisonment in broadmoor on the grounds that he is evil, feigning mental illness, and deserving of a harsh penal regime and to be held morally accountable for his actions (cross, 2014).

moral judgement pursued by news media in these cases often employs the concept of ‘evil’, in much the same way as the scriptwriters of nightmare on elm street characterised freddy kruger.

it is used with acknowledgement or even support for the possibility of ‘madness’, but as an additional judgement about the ‘badness’ of the perpetrator which doesn’t allow for mitigating circumstances for criminal or violent acts.

what is a case example of repudiation of mental illness as mitigation in criminal cases?

on 22 july 2011 in norway, anders behring breivik exploded a bomb outside the norwegian prime minister’s office in oslo that killed eight and injured scores of people.

a few hours later breivik arrived at utoya Island, the site of a labour party youth camp, where he methodically shot and killed 69 people, mainly teenagers.

it was a deeply disturbing incident, the shock of which was compounded by breivik’s statement that his actions were ‘necessary’ to awaken norway to the threat posed by islam.

breivik’s appointed lawyer initially responded by telling reporters his client was insane. four months after the attacks psychiatric thinking apparently endorsed the lawyer’s proposal, and forensic psychiatrists diagnosed breivik to be a paranoid schizophrenic living in his own delusional world and not responsible for his actions.

the diagnosis angered survivors and bereaved families and news and commentary media because a future trial could find breivik to be of diminished responsibility and order him to be sent to a psychiatric hospital for treatment rather than to a prison for punishment.

breivik himself was aware of the implication of the schizophrenia diagnosis, describing it as ‘insulting’ because it undermined his claim to political (though not criminal) responsibility for the massacre.

a second forensic psychiatric assessment concluded one week before the trial found that breivik had a ‘narcissistic personality disorder’ but not a mental illness. he was therefore judged in this second evaluation to be sane within the mcnaughtan formulation.

breivik’s trial hinged on prosecution attempts to declare breivik insane while his defence argued his actions were those of a politically motivated sane individual.

in the end, the district court of oslo trying him found him to be sane and to be guilty, and declared breivik’s views on multiculturalism, immigration and islam to be absurd but not delusional.

his claim to be part of a modern-day knights templar movement was judged to be nonsense rather than the deluded rambling of a paranoid schizophrenic.

how have discussions viewed the breivik case?

while news coverage shows the public and forensic psychiatry united in rejecting the validity of breivik’s arguments, they diverged completely on the source of them.

forensic psychiatry in two separate assessments deemed him ‘mad’, suggesting that the arguments and evidence of his apparent rationale were in fact irrational, delusional and ‘labouring under a defect of reason’, as the mcnaughtan rules stipulate.

public opinion, the newspapers and the jury decided that brevik’s arguments and the evidence he offered to justify his actions were simply wrong – absurd and nonsensical, but not caused by a ‘defect of reasoning’ which compelled him to action.

in consequence, brevik got the verdict he wanted and was sentenced to 21 years in prison with a minimum of 10 (the maximum sentence possible in norway), with the possibility of extension were he considered a continuing danger to society.

this case shows both the highly subjective and complex nature of judgements which are made about ‘madness’ in psychiatric and legal procedures, and the symbiosis between media representations and public expressions of belief and reaction which create the frame in which those decisions are made.

this case is not only a complex illustration of the interactions and tensions in media representations of the ‘mad’ and ‘bad’ and how the space between those two constructs is negotiated, but also of their dynamic and emergent nature in relation to the feedback from audiences.