What the New York Times gets wrong about PTSD

http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2016-05/du-wtn051916.php

Public Release: 19-May-2016
What the New York Times gets wrong about PTSD
Drexel University

Believe it or not, both the public and policy-makers often get their ideas from the media. When those ideas are formed about something as serious and impactful as posttraumatic stress disorder, it's important for the media to tell the story in the right way.

With that in mind, Drexel researchers examined how the country's most influential paper, the New York Times, portrayed posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) from the year it was first added to the American Psychiatric Association's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (1980) to present day (2015).

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Between 1980 and 2015, 871 news articles mentioned PTSD. In their American Journal of Orthopsychiatry paper, Purtle and his co-authors, Katherine Lynn and Marshal Malik, pointed out three specific issues in the Times' coverage that could have negative consequences.

"New York Times portrayals of populations affected by PTSD do not reflect the epidemiology of the disorder."

The Drexel team found that 50.6 percent of the Times' articles focused on military cases of PTSD, including 63.5 percent of the articles published in the last 10 years.

In actuality, Purtle's past research showed that most PTSD cases are related to noncombat traumas in civilians. The number of civilians affected by PTSD is 13 times larger than the number of military personnel affected by the disorder.

Occurrences are also much more likely in those who survive non-combat traumas, which include sexual assault (30-80 percent of survivors develop PTSD), nonsexual assault (23-39 percent develop it), disasters (30-40 percent) and car crashes (25-33 percent), among other causes. Veterans of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have just a 20 percent occurrence of PTSD.

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"PTSD was negatively framed in many articles."

Self-stigma attached to PTSD has been identified as a strong barrier to seeking treatment.

As such, with fewer and fewer articles over the years mentioning treatment options (decreasing from 19.4 percent of all PTSD-focused articles in 1980-1995 to just 5.7 percent in 2005-2015), it is particularly harmful when articles focused on negative portrayals of those with PTSD.

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"Most themes in the New York Times PTSD articles pertained to proximal causes and consequences of the disorder."

Most articles in the study's 35-year focus centered on the traumatic exposure that led to PTSD, as well as the symptoms that result from the disorder. They rarely told stories of survivors and prevention.

Although nearly three quarters of articles mentioned a traumatic cause of PTSD, concepts such as risk/protective factors or prevention were barely mentioned. Risk/protective factors were only mentioned in 2.6 percent of articles and prevention was only mentioned in 2.5 percent.

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