Bridget Walsh sat in the library, gazing at her laptop and shaking her head. "The conversation has to change," she said. "Now."

Walsh, a senior psychology major at the College of New Jersey, turned her laptop around to show an article about Devin Patrick Kelley, the perpetrator of the mass shooting in Sutherland Springs, Texas.

"I am tired of only reading about mental illness in the context of violent crimes," she continued. "I don't think I have ever seen an article about someone who is managing their mental illness and doing good things."

In 2013, The Sun, a UK news company, published an article titled "1200 Killed by Mental Patients". The article rattles off ten sensational accounts of violent crimes committed by former mental health patients.

Mentally ill people are portrayed as aggressors throughout most of the article, until one nears the bottom of the page. There is a response from another journalist who says "mentally ill people are up to ten times more likely to become a victim of crime than the average person."

Even further down on the page is another writer, the chief executive of Mind, who writes:

"Mental health is far too often spoken of in terms of aggression and violence. We must remember there are 1.2 million people in touch with secondary mental health services — and the overwhelming majority are not hurting others."

"But there is concern that investment in mental health services is decreasing," he continues. "Mind is campaigning for better crisis care. It is wrong that when people reach out they do not get the help they need."

This is an important message.

The problem is that most readers will not get to the bottom of that article.

They will most likely read the first couple of anecdotes of violent mental health patients to corroborate the attention-grabbing headline, then move on to something else.

Even if the readers do get to the bottom of the article, the media outlet purposely designed the page to portray mentally ill people as overwhelmingly violent in order to grab consumer attention.

However, not all mental health patients were, are, or ever will be violent.

Though this statement may seem obvious to many readers, it is important to consider the impact that media coverage of mental illness has on people's subconscious view of mental illness.

"The implicit associations we harbor in our subconscious cause us to have feelings and attitudes about other people based on characteristics such as race, ethnicity, age, and appearance," according to the Kirwan Institute of Ohio University.

"These associations develop over the course of a lifetime beginning at a very early age through exposure to direct and indirect messages," they continue. "In addition to early life experiences, the media and news programming are often-cited origins of implicit associations."

So what exactly are people reading about mental illness recently?

The PHEME Project developed an online tool that tracks how different topics are covered in the media over time, using key word tagging and geolocation.

They track the “3Vs of Big Data” according to Gartner, “volume, velocity, and variety,” to help evaluate a fourth, often overlooked V: “veracity.” Users can isolate various topics related to mental health to over any select period of time to see the topics covered, and can go even further to view the individual articles.

When all of the different topics in the database are selected, one can see the frequency of the different topics covered. The graph below indicates that suicide, which is documented by the purple line, has been significantly covered more in the past three months. (71%) Second in coverage to suicide is schizophrenia, marked by the grey line.

One can also select various “associations” to cross reference with this data. There are 12316 total articles in the database with the key word “mental health" from the past three months. When referenced against mental health, the words “mass shooting” show up 8036 times in the database. That is more than 65 percent of the articles in the database. The word “treatment” shows up 2562 times, which accounts for 20.8 percent.

From this data, one could conclude that the news media mentions mental illness at a higher frequency in relation to a mass shooting than in relation to potential treatments for mental illness.

In her 2006 article, “Media Portrayal of Mental Illness and its Treatments: What Effect Does it Have on People with Mental Illness?,” Heather Stuart, of the Department of Community Health and Epidemiology at Queen’s University, discusses dominant media portrayals of mental illnesses and their impact on people with mental illness.

“Studies consistently show that both entertainment and news media provide overwhelmingly dramatic and distorted images of mental illness that emphasize dangerousness, criminality and unpredictability,” Stuart writes. “They also model negative reactions to the mentally ill, including fear, rejection, derision and ridicule.”

The fervent academic criticism of media coverage of mental illness continues a decade later. In their 2016 article, “Trends in News Media Coverage of Mental Illness in the United States: 1995–2014,” McGinty et. al. of Johns Hopkins University discuss the disproportionate coverage of mental-health-related violence over successful mental health treatment over the past twenty years. Apparently, the issue has worsened over the past decade.

“To assess trends in this national discourse, we studied the volume and content of a random sample of 400 news stories about mental illness from the period 1995–2014," they write. "Compared to news stories in the first decade of the study period, those in the second decade were more likely to mention mass shootings by people with mental illnesses. The most frequently mentioned topic across the study period was violence (55 percent overall) divided into categories of interpersonal violence or self-directed (suicide) violence, followed by stories about any type of treatment for mental illness (47 percent)."

"Fewer news stories, only 14 percent, described successful treatment for or recovery from mental illness," they continue. "The news media’s continued emphasis on interpersonal violence is highly disproportionate to actual rates of violence among those with mental illnesses."

Furthermore, they write, "Research suggests that this focus may exacerbate social stigma and decrease support for public policies that benefit people with mental illnesses.”

Both articles suggest a need for a change in the media’s approach to mental illness in both quantity and quality. They argue is on the onus of the media to recognize and combat certain stereotypes of mental illness from which they have previously capitalized. There are people out there advocating for this change.

Some media outlets have personally addressed the media's complicity on the stigma against mental illness. In 2015, Kirstin Fawcett of the U.S. News wrote an article titled "How Mental Illness is Misrepresented in the Media".

Fawcett outlines six common misconceptions about people with mental illness that are enforced by the media.

1) "People with mental illnesses are criminal or violent."

2) "People with mental illness look different than others."

3) "People with mental illnesses are childish and silly."

4) "Mental illnesses are all severe – or all alike."

5) "Psychiatric hospitals cause more harm than good."

6) "People with mental illnesses can’t recover."

She combats each of those stereotypes with statistics that undermine those assumptions. She also uses anecdotes from people struggling with mental illness in an effort to refute these claims.

In her article, Fawcett frequently cites Otto Wahl's Media Madness: Public Images of Mental Illness. This book was described as "must reading" by a former executive director of National Alliance for the Mentally Ill, Laurie Flynn.

In his book, Wahl describes a survey that was conducted by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation in 1991. The interviewer asked where the respondents got their education about mental illness. "Far and away the most cited sources were mass media ones," he wrote.

Wahl writes extensively about the ways media portray mental illness in a negative light. However, he has not lost hope in the future of mental health coverage. He writes:

"I am encouraged by the fact that, since I began working on the topic of media images of mental illness in the 1970s, I have seen dramatic growth in the number of organizations and individuals who have made change in media portrayal one of their major goals. The U.S. President's Commission the Employment of People with Disabilities, the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill, the National Mental Health Association, the American Psychiatric Association, the National Mental Health Consumers' Association, the Carter Center, and the National Stigma Clearinghouse, to name just a few, now have strong commitments to reducing mental illness stigma and to altering the media images that contribute to it."

The Dart Center for Journalism and Trauma, a project of the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism, provides journalism students around the world with an array of online resources and guidelines to help them cover sensitive issues in a more professional manner.

In their mission statement, the Dart Center says it “creates and sustains interdisciplinary collaboration and communication among news professionals, clinicians, academic researchers and others concerned with violence, conflict and tragedy.” From classroom resources to graphic tip sheets, the Dart Center discusses coverage of a variety of issues, such as mass shootings, PTSD, and mental health using a using a holistic and comprehensive approach.

At the College of New Jersey, the student newspaper The Signal follows guidelines on how to approach writing and editing content covering mental illness.

Specifically, they follow an entry in the AP stylebook that was added in 2013. The entry implores journalists to ask questions such as: “When is such information relevant to a story? Who is an authoritative source for a person’s illness, diagnosis and treatment?”

It also suggests writers avoid using derogatory terms, unless they are part of a quote, and not to automatically assume mental illness is a factor in a violent crime.

College media outlets belonging to the College Media Association must adhere to a certain set of standards of behavior and quality of content. The Association has the power to censure certain student news organizations for violating that conduct.

Two of the main guiding principles featured on the Poynter Institute’s ethics website are “seek truth and report it fully as possible” and “minimize harm.”

Trevor Wilson, a 27-year-old local general contractor and longtime avid news reader, reflected on the coverage of mental illness in the news.

“[Mental illness] usually a side note to a bigger story,” he said. “You really only hear about it in the news when someone with a mental illness does something bad and then it’s 'well everyone should have seen this coming' or 'he didn’t get the help he needed.'"

"But if you had more coverage of programs that help people with mental illness, it might be a little less taboo and the coverage would be more positive," he continued. "Then maybe more people would seek help knowing it’s available and there are other people like them."