Adjudication No. 914 (April 1997) [1997] APC 15

ADJUDICATION No. 914 (April 1997)

A complaint by the Mental Health Legal Centre Inc., of Victoria, about the use of the word "PSYCHO" in a heading referring to convicted Tasmanian killer Martin Bryant raises issues of stereotyping and stigma arising from media coverage.

The Mental Health Legal Centre claims that the heading "AUSTRALIAN PSYCHO" above a picture of Bryant and the words "How village idiot MARTIN BRYANT became a cold-blooded killer" on the cover of Who magazine in December last year is misrepresentative, offensive and tends to stereotype people with mental illness.

In a letter to the magazine the centre said the "eyecatcher" heading would fuel "baseless public perception that mental illness and mass violence are necessarily linked".

There appears to have been general agreement by experts that Bryant was not mentally ill in the strict medical or legal sense. (There have been references to him possibly suffering from Asperger's syndrome.) Who magazine's article did not suggest he was mentally ill although it responded to the complainant that Bryant clearly has a "mental problem". This presumably was based on the belief that ordinary people don't take the lives of 35 others in a single afternoon.

The magazine published a letter from the complainant as well as a number of others which complained about the use of language such as "idiot" and "psycho".

In the context of Alfred Hitchcock's movie of the same name, the use of the word "psycho" in this case would seem not to be out of order - this was a cold-blooded act of murder.

But the question is whether its use tends wrongly or unfairly to label or denigrate people with a mental illness.

In this case there was no reference to mental illness, as acknowledged by the complainant. Without such a reference or a finding that Bryant was mentally ill a case cannot be successfully made out that the mentally ill have been unfairly treated or misrepresented.

While obviously a dramatic headline, the Press Council finds that it did not breach any of its principles and therefore dismisses the complaint.