People see what papers show! Psychiatry's stint with print media: A pilot study from Mumbai, India

Mass media including television, internet, and newspapers influences public views about various issues by means of how it covers an issue. Newspapers have a wider reach and may affect the impact that a news story has on the reader by factors such as placement of the story within the different pages. We did a pilot study to see how two English newspapers from Mumbai, India were covering psychiatry related news stories. The study was done over a period of 3 months. We found a total of 870 psychiatry related news stories in the two newspapers over 3 months with the majority of them being covered in the main body of the newspapers. Sex-related crime stories and/or sexual dysfunction stories received the highest coverage among all the news while treatment and/or recovery related stories received very little coverage. It is crucial that the print media takes more efforts in improving reporting of psychiatry-related stories and help in de-stigmatizing psychiatry as a discipline.