With an Australian Federal Election looming, there is value in revisiting how we tell stories of mental illness in the public domain, and the ways in which storytelling can shape the lives of those diagnosed or being treated for mental illness.

While most political discourse in 2025 has been non-specific on matters of mental health, many of the issues concerning voters – cost-of-living, housing crisis, potential job losses – are deeply connected to the social and emotional wellbeing of individuals and the communities they serve. CEO of Mental Health Australia – Carolyn Nikoloski – states that 81% of voters are concerned about mental health, and 75% want to see more political action.

While we wait for strong political action, we can focus on more nuanced storytelling as a powerful form of social care. The history of mental illness is one of constant ‘othering’ and marginalization (both physical and symbolic). In the years before the seventeenth century in Europe, people with mental illness were placed on boats, taken to foreign locations and dumped there.

They were later contained in facilities previously saved for lepers, which ultimately became workhouses, madhouses, and asylums. When asylums began to close in the 1980s, poor mechanisms for community support meant most people with mental illness found new forms of isolation on the streets and in prisons. Within each of these historical flashpoints were people who sought to do good but largely operated within systems where mental illness was misunderstood and feared.

Our contemporary forms of control are invisible though no less powerful. My own research, which looked at how Australian journalists tell stories about people with mental illness, illustrated this tendency to other and marginalize people with mental illness, most frequently containing them to a stigmatized identity. The physical control of the past, replaced by a symbolic blemish.

Forty-five per cent of mental health-related articles tell stories about people with mental illness associated with violence, prisons, drugs, homelessness, and suicide. If an alien came down from Mars and only had access to Australian media reporting on mental health, they would assume people with mental illness are violent, abnormal others.

The reality of mental illness for contemporary citizens is much more mundane; amounting to a silent suffering housed within a stigmatized identity. And moreover, the reality of contemporary living is that mental health has become a genuine concern for all.

History tells us that the way mental illness has been treated has been about isolation, othering, and stigmatization. Simple means to dilute complex, individual stories. There has also been a tendency to treat people with mental illness like a one homogenous blob, underappreciating just how diverse individual suffering can be.

The answer to the wellbeing crisis that faces this country is not an easy one. But greater levels of social care, beginning with the stories we tell and the language used by our leaders, will go some way to lessening the burden of stigma because they replace othering with normalisation. Stories of violence, drug-filled rampages, parents who take the lives of their kids; these are the sensationalized extreme end of the human condition.

They are the stories we tell and hear most frequently, but they fail to represent the reality of mental illness, and they make mental illness what it has been for so many centuries: something to be feared.