Presenting schizophrenia as though it satisfies our questions is deeply stigmatising

The events of this past weekend have been shocking and heart-wrenching for the country. I live five minutes’ walk from Bondi Junction Westfield and the loud hum of a circling police helicopter filled our living room on Saturday afternoon as my partner and I watched the horrifying news roll in. 

I feel heavy grief for the lives lost in such a random act of violence and I empathise wholly with the desire to try and put the pieces together, to understand the attacker’s motivations, and why anybody would do such terrible things to innocent strangers. However, the revelation that he lived with schizophrenia has become an alarmingly prominent detail in the reporting and has been cited as top-line information in multiple reports, including one Herald Sun article that declares in its headline “[Name] had schizophrenia but wasn’t in mental health system”. 

On Monday, the alleged attacker’s father addressed the media in tears saying that he loves his son and that he doesn’t understand why he committed these acts of extreme violence. In a deeply upsetting moment, he told journalists “to you, he’s a monster but to me, he was a very sick boy.” 

While an experience of psychosis may go some way to explaining what happened on Saturday, it certainly doesn’t tell the whole story and we should be wary of an overreliance on this information. Presenting schizophrenia (or any other complex mental health condition) as though it satisfies our questions is deeply misleading and stigmatising. Implying that the attacker’s diagnosis alone can explain why he decided to attack and murder multiple people is simplistic, offensive and damaging. 

As a journalist who has written extensively about the stigma surrounding complex mental health conditions, I have already been contacted by multiple people with lived experience, and their loved ones, who are concerned about what the media will do with this narrative. Anita Link, a peer ambassador for SANE who lives with bipolar disorder and has experienced postnatal psychosis, says that reporting “incomplete details about the perpetrator’s mental health negatively focuses media consumers’ attention on everyone who lives with a mental illness, and perpetuates the stigma we already live with”.

Australian journalists have access to ethical guidelines on reporting complex mental health conditions in the context of violence and crime, as laid out by the media organisation Mindframe, which stipulate that mental illness cannot be presented as the sole cause of violence and that professionals should ideally be interviewed about what can be done to prevent similar incidents occurring again in the future. Despite this, reports will still often stray into sensationalising and dehumanising language. 

While many of us have been primed by movies, television and media to believe that schizophrenia, a mental health condition characterised by delusions and hallucinations, is an inherent risk factor for violence, this is largely untrue. While people with complex mental health conditions such as bipolar disorder, schizophrenia and schizoaffective disorder have a slightly elevated likelihood of committing violent acts, the vast majority will never pose a danger to society.

People with schizophrenia are far more likely to be the victims of violence, with one US study finding that people living with the condition were at least 14 times more likely to be the victim of violent crime than to be arrested for one. There is also a growing body of evidence that when people with complex mental health conditions commit violent or aggressive acts there are often other factors at play. For example, the risk of violence with a complex mental health condition is increased seriously in combination with a substance use disorder.

For people living with complex mental health conditions like schizophrenia, watching the reports and commentary unfolding around the alleged attacker’s mental health condition in the coming days and weeks will be incredibly distressing. Rarely are Australians presented with any positive journalism reporting on people living with complex mental health conditions (despite endless stories of wildly successful and impressive people in our community who live with these diagnoses). Instead, people living with these conditions will invariably be confronted with commentary that will flatten, stigmatise, and stereotype. 

This kind of journalism also tends to miss broader systemic concerns about failures of the mental health care system to capture and wrap around seriously ill people and why people fall through the cracks when it comes to trying to access care. It’s crucial that we maintain vigilance in the face of reporting like this because stigma causes real-world harm. Stigma around complex mental health conditions isolates people, it makes recovery worse, and it makes people far less likely to reach out for help when they need it. Often, people with schizophrenia will report that the stigma they experience as a result of their mental health condition is the most disruptive and debilitating part of their lives. 

On Sunday, I visited the Biennale of Sydney at White Bay Power Station in Balmain with my mother, who lives with schizophrenia. We walked around the exhibition and sat in front of some striking digital displays. I made her take a photo in her rainbow dress alongside cut-outs of figures created by the artist Kaylene Whiskey and we laughed about how much she fit in among the garish colours. Returning home to a sudden onslaught of reports about the attacker’s mental health condition presented a stark contrast and reminder of the spectrum of people’s experience with mental illness, as well as how much more we have to learn and listen to people from within these communities.