Handbook of Mental Health Communication
The Handbook of Mental Health Communication provides timely and authoritative coverage of the impact of message-based mental health promotion. Positioning mental health communication in the context of socio-cultural causes of mental illness, the Handbook underscores that understanding communication effects on mental health outcomes begins with recognizing how people experiencing mental illness process relevant information about their own mental health.
Organized into 33 chapters, the Handbook synthesizes public health, psychopathology, and mass communication scholarship into a single resource. Throughout the book, nearly 100 leading scholars collectively translate biased information attention, interpretation, and memory in mental illness to real-world implications for the use of mass communication to optimize and safeguard mental health messaging.
The first book of its kind to offer a transdisciplinary overview of mass communication approaches to mental health, the Handbook of Mental Health Communication:
Addresses key areas of health communication such as information processing, digital media, special populations, and measurement methods
Provides systematic guidance on reducing the stigma of mental illness symptomatology
Offers clear descriptions of promising mass communication strategies for mental health promotion
Reviews approaches for informing the research agenda on mental health mass communication
Includes practical strategies for designing and measuring persuasive health messages
The Handbook of Mental Health Communication is the perfect textbook for advanced undergraduate and graduate students in public health, communication, psychology, public affairs, and medical programs, and an invaluable resource for scholars, researchers, lecturers, and all health communication practitioners.
Editors
Marco Yzer
Dr. Marco Yzer is a Professor at the University of Minnesota Hubbard School of Journalism & Mass Communication. Dr. Yzer’s research interest is in explaining people’s health behavioral decisions as a function of how they use information that is relevant to their health. His primary focus is on mental health communication, or more specifically, the intersection of mental health and strategic communication. His research interest started with the proposition that a thorough understanding of the cognitive characteristics of mental illnesses is required for designing messages that help people with mental illness. Messages that are not informed by a deep understanding of mental illnesses can harm the very people those messages are supposed to help.
Jason T. Siegel
Dr. Jason T. Siegel is a professor of psychology at the School of Social Science, Policy, and Evaluation. His research focuses on the social psychology of health behavior change. Dr. Siegel applies theories of persuasion and motivation to create messages for increasing help-seeking among people with depression, reducing the stigmatization of people with depression, increasing organ donor registration behavior, and reducing substance abuse in adolescents. His work has resulted in over 100 publications with over 50 different student co-authors.
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