Adjudication No. 1047 (August 1999) [1999] APC 41

ADJUDICATION No. 1047 (August 1999)

The Press Council has dismissed the main thrust of a complaint against The Herald Sun over the use of the term "psycho" in a headline referring to the brutal murder of a Melbourne woman. But it has upheld the complaint to the extent that the complainant was denied an opportunity to challenge, in a letter, the use of the term which it saw as a gratuitous emphasis on psychiatric disability.

The Mental Health Legal Centre Inc. of Victoria, argued that in common parlance the word "psycho" is used in connection with people with a mental illness and as such the headline Psycho Knife Killer "stigmatises" such people and "fuel(s) negative connotations" about mental health by encouraging a perception that people with a mental illness are violent.

The newspaper denied this. It pointed out that nowhere in its report of the murder was mention made that the killer was or may have been suffering from a mental illness. It argues that its choice of the term referred to "the nature of the murder" (described in the report as "savage" and "frenzied") rather than to the mental state of the perpetrator. The word "psycho", it maintained, graphically conveys the nature of the act due to its indelible association with the Alfred Hitchcock movie of the same name in which an horrific knifing murder was portrayed.

The Press Council recognises that some readers would regard the use of the word "psycho" as contributing to a damaging stereotype of people with a mental illness. However, it is not for the Press Council to judge newspapers' language in circumstances where the use of a word remains controversial in the community generally.

Five days after the article appeared the complainant wrote a letter for publication putting its point of view about the word "psycho". The letter was not published. Rather, the paper wrote back five weeks later, disputing the complainant's assertions.

The Press Council regularly encourages complainants to write letters to the editor when they want to take issue with published material. In this case, the Mental Health Legal Centre followed this practice promptly, but to no avail.

It is by encouraging debate on the changing use and meanings of words that the appropriateness of terms such as "psycho" will be decided over time.

NOTE: Subsequent to the issuing of the adjudication, the Herald Sun informed the Council that it had published, four weeks after the original article, an edited version of a letter from an office bearer at the Mental Health Legal Centre. Neither the office bearer who pressed the complaint nor the newspaper itself referred to this published letter in the course of the complaint.