Resources For Journalists

2024 mental health reporting guides

A dynamic and thorough guide for mental health reporting

The Carter Center Journalism Resource Guide on Mental Health Reporting supports journalists' efforts to report accurately and effectively on mental health issues, including suicide and addiction and substance use, in ways that do not reinforce stereotypes or perpetuate stigma.

This up-to-date version, published in March 2024 with support from the the National Institute for Health Care Management, is available in both English and Spanish.

Fellowship News

©Lisa Kurian Philip/WBEZ: Isabelle Dizon contacted her campus counseling center when she hit a low point during her sophomore year of college, but never heard back. Now a junior at the University of Illinois at Chicago, she hopes the school hires someone at the center to, at the very least, pick up the phone.

She called the number on her syllabus offering counseling. No one picked up.

WBEZ by Lisa Kurian Philip, March 21, 2024: Isabelle Dizon describes her transition to college as “messy.” She went from a public high school to a private art school that was far less diverse and cost too much, she said. The expense was stressful and she couldn’t connect with her…

©Navya Shukla/The Oglethorpe Echo: Katie Edwards, a counselor at Oglethorpe County Elementary School, helps third-grader Londyn Wilson with a work- sheet during a guidance lesson last month. The lessons are regularly held to guide students' empathy, emotion regulation, perseverance and more.

High need, low accessibility: Oglethorpe County residents face barriers to mental health care, even as teens and schools are willing to have the conversation

The Oglethorpe Echo/the Cox Institute’s Journalism Writing Lab at the University of Georgia by Navya Shukla and Sydney Rainwater, March 21, 2024: Sonja Thompson Roach remembers the moment last year when a photographer took photos and interviewed her son and his friends for a Time magazine story on mental health…

©Mark Weber/The Daily Memphian: Sickle cell patient Alexis Tappan, right, is checked out by Rana Cooper on at the Methodist Hospital Cancer Institute and Comprehensive Sickle Cell Center. Memphis is home to one of the nation’s largest populations of adults living with sickle cell disease.

For many Black sickle cell patients, care must reach deeper

The Daily Memphian,  by Aisling Mäki March 5, 2024: In Memphis, Black patients with an inherited blood disorder carry trauma from the dismissal of their chronic pain and severity of symptoms. “Sickle cell is a very aggressive, traumatizing and difficult disease to live with,” said April Ward-McGrory, 42, a lifelong…