Health Communication

Mental Health Mass Communication: Advancements in Optimizing and Safeguarding Mental Health Messaging

Health Communication will dedicate a special issue, titled “Mental Health Mass Communication: Advancements in Optimizing and Safeguarding Mental Health Messaging” to expand the conceptual and empirical foundation of message-based mental health promotion. Please note that manuscripts will be considered for review only if they directly address mental health messaging, that is, messages intentionally designed to improve mental health in a specific audience. 

Mental health challenges have become one of the leading public health issues of our time, negatively affecting the well-being of millions of people. In response, there have been significant communication efforts to promote mental health in the general population, reduce stigma of mental illness, and encourage people affected by mental health challenges to seek professional help. The most significant contributions to mental health messaging arguably comes from integrating communication scholarship with what is known about the clinical and social-epidemiological aspects of mental health and mental illness. This special issue aims to highlight the benefits of conducting mental health mass communication scholarship at the intersection of mass and health communication, psychopathology, public health, and other pertinent fields, thus contributing to continued intellectual development of the field of mental health mass communication.

Discussions of a wide range of dimensions relevant to this topic are invited, with a special emphasis on work that explicitly discerns the various roles that mental health and illness characteristics can play with regard to the development, processing, and effects of mass media messages that aim to improve mental health, or clarifies the conditions under which we can expect mental health mass media messages to have various types of effects.  We actively encourage submissions from a range of sub-areas, as scholars studying health campaigns, psychopathology researchers, and those who primarily investigate mass communication, for example, have much to learn from one another. A minimum requirement is that authors should meaningfully engage mass and health communication scholarship as a foundational or integral part of their conceptual framework.

Of particular interest are manuscripts that do any of the following:

• Empirically investigate theoretical approaches for maximizing the success of mental health mass media campaigns.
• Combine theorizing from psychopathology, communication, public health, and other pertinent fields to improve mental health communication.
• Investigate if and why people with mental illness process and respond to mental health messaging differently than those without mental illness.
• Empirically assess how specific elements of mental health mass media campaigns can influence success (e.g., investigating the interaction of campaign design elements with audience characteristics).
• Illustrate or explain the potential for mental health mass communication campaigns to cause adverse unintended effects
• Demonstrate unique methodological approaches for developing and evaluating mental health mass communication efforts.