Mental disabilities: Fighting stigma and discrimination in public service announcements

In the last few years, the role of public service announcements (PSA) in conveying a message of social responsibility to a wide audience has increased due to the fact that many governments have adopted a less authoritative approach in favour of policy-making based on promotion and education. Against this backdrop of global changing policies, governments have started to include discourses of diversity and inclusivity in mass media campaigns. For instance, more and more mental health organizations have been launching awareness-raising campaigns on diversity and inclusion featuring a diverse group of individuals to speak out against commonly held stereotypes and the so called ‘implicit bias’. The present research examined a sample of PSAs on mental disabilities collected from the websites of two non-profit organizations: the Canadian Mental Health Association (CMHA) and the Ad Council, USA. Against the theoretical framework of multimodal critical discourse analysis and visual argumentation, the research aimed to explore how non-profit organizations promote diversity and inclusion through verbal and visual argumentative-persuasive techniques and to what extent multimodal argumentation contributes to fighting stigma and discrimination, changing public attitudes and behaviour towards mental disabilities, especially among the young generations.