Karolina Illina

Abstract:

In months recent to when this paper was written, news media frequently spoke of mental illness being the culprit of mass shootings. And if these negative stereotypes are perpetuated from the news, the researcher wondered if the news is the only outlet which supplies negative perceptions of people with mental illnesses; as coincidentally, many Americans hold unfavorable opinions of people with mental illness. The researcher decided to analyse how popular Young Adult (YA) novels treat the images of their characters with mental illnesses; YA novels were chosen because “young adult” is likely when people are introduced to the concept of “mental illness”. Therefore eight books were selected for analysis, from a list of fifty of the most popular Young Adult novels; these eight were originally thought to contain significant characters with a mental illness. However, later into the research process, the researcher, in addition, analysed a popular Young Adult novel with a character that had no mental illness, as a “control”. The analysis consisted of coding for positive/negative/both perceptions of the character being analysed. It was found that the number of positive and negative perceptions were relatively even, but most mentally ill characters had slightly more positive perceptions than negative--as opposed to the control which received far more positives than negatives. Although these novels portrayed only a small sample of mental illnesses, excluding mental illnesses such as schizophrenia. These novels in combination with other factors produce an effect in how new generations will perceive people with mental illnesses.