Mental health and the media: A professor’s research

*This article was first published with The Scout on April 17, 2020*

When she started her Ph.D., Rachelle Pavelko was interested in health communication, specifically mental health.

“That definitely stemmed from a really personal narrative around obsessive-compulsive disorder, which I have, and seeing how the media was portraying it so differently from my personal experience,” Pavelko said.

Pavelko, an assistant professor for public relations, is actively a part of the research community, completing studies and continuing research about the media effects on mental health communication.

She said characters on TV shows, like “Monk,” portrayed trivial behaviors such as being organized and color-coding. Pavelko also mentioned online quizzes that asked questions like “how much do these pencils being out of order bother you?” were shared on social media with the OCD hashtag.

“Looking at those portrayals and those conversations and feeling like, my mental health really suffers from having OCD and I don’t always see it as this super trivial, lighthearted thing that can actually be beneficial,” Pavelko said.

This semester, Pavelko started teaching a health communication course at Bradley that she created.

“Doing this type of research and teaching courses related to it, I think only makes me a stronger professor and a stronger researcher in terms of hearing other people’s perspectives and their personal experiences,” Pavelko said.

The course started with interpersonal topics, including doctor-patient communication and health disparities. Other topics discussed throughout the course include portrayals of mental illness in the media and health campaigns, telehealth and portrayals of body image in the media.

“This course this semester has really benefited me, in terms of feeling like the way we talk about mental health is changing,” Pavelko said. “It’s been a really tangible thing to hold on to. There’s positive change and really seeing that in action.”

When she was working on her dissertation, “Beyond stigma: Developing and testing a scale of perceived trivialization of mental illness,” she created a measure of trivialization in the media, where before there was only a measure for stigmatization.

Pavelko is working on building upon the research done in her dissertation and applying the scale she created that measures symptoms as benefits, in terms of being trivialized, to different mental health issues.

“Going beyond OCD, ADHD, really anxiety-based disorders,” Pavelko said. “What happens when I apply it to a typically stigmatized illness? So, if I apply the scale to media coverage of bipolar disorder, what happens then?”

According to Pavelko, when mental health is talked about more in popular culture, it creates a pathway for the average person to realize it’s okay they are going through a mental health challenge and for them to talk about.

“I think now more than ever, in our current world, there’s so much bad and negative and hard to process information that it’s taking a toll on all of our mental health, and everyone needs to be aware that they have to take care of themselves in the physical and the mental,” Pavelko said.

She wants to build off of her “My Favorite Murder” podcast study where she looked at how the hosts open up the show with their own mental health issues and the effect it had on the audience.

Last year, one of the hosts posted a picture of the medication she takes every day in the palm of her hand with #myfavoritemeds.

Pavelko wants to study the usage of the hashtag to see the relationship based on the positive media effects of the first study.

She partnered with Grace Wang, assistant professor for advertising on another study about NBA player Kevin Love’s personal testimony about having panic attacks and the comments it received.

They want to build on that and do a second study that looks at how people react when they are shown clips of athletes from different sports and of different genders talking about their mental health challenges.

Wang added that she has worked on multiple projects with Pavelko, and she is actively working on a project relevant to COVID-19.

“Rachelle is definitely my ‘work spouse,’ and I know I can always count on her,” Wang said. “She is absolutely a productive scholar, a great teacher, and a valuable asset to the Communication Department and to our students.”

Photo via http://www.rachellepavelko.com/