Madness and Anchoring in the Brazilian Press: A Study in Social Representation

Abstract

The Brawzilian Psychiatric Reform sought to introduce new perspectives on madness, integrating other meanings about mental health; however, it seems that mad and crazy are used in everyday communications to describe social events and behaviors. This study aimed to investigate the main contents and beliefs that anchor the social representations of madness in a printed newspaper. A Thematic Content Analysis was carried out with 846 articles from the newspaper Folha de São Paulo from the years 1978 and 2018. Seven categories were constructed that anchor the idea of madness: Eccentric, Unpredictable, Intense, Irrational, Violent, Subversive, and Transgressive. The stories reinforce the stigma of madness as something divergent, strange. The construction of an inverse anchoring underlies the representations of madness, demarcating the distance between the “normal” and the “crazy. It was concluded that madness is still understood based on social devaluation and demeaning, leading to exclusionary practices.