“How Dark A World It Is … Where Mental Health Is Poorly Treated”: Mental Illness Frames In Sermons Given After The Sandy Hook Shootings

Abstract

In the aftermath of the Newtown, CT, massacre, the United States is engaging in public deliberations that will reshape future mental healthcare policies, practices, and systems. We know little about the clergy’s contributions to these deliberations. Clergy, as with psychiatrists and mental health specialists, are members of the helping professions and are regarded as front-line mental health workers and gatekeepers to mental health services. To consider clergy contributions, we drew on Entman’s framing perspective to study sermons given in the state of Connecticut after the Sandy Hook shootings. We examined 73 posted full-text sermons and performed the constant comparative method on 20 that made references to mental illness. We discovered clergy used “social support” and “social system” frames. Upon developing these frames, we discuss the study’s contributions by considering clergy silence, their use of frames to delineate between the secular and the spiritual, their mitigation and promotion of mental illness stigma, and their incomplete social system frame.

Publication Date

12-1-2016

Publication Title

Health Communication

Volume

31

Issue

12

Number of Pages

1539-1547

Document Type

Article

Personal Identifier

scopus

DOI Link

https://doi.org/10.1080/10410236.2015.1089458

Socpus ID

84964350660 (Scopus)

Source API URL

https://api.elsevier.com/content/abstract/scopus_id/84964350660

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