What is it about?
Mental health is everywhere in public conversation — on social media, in television shows, in celebrity interviews. Very little of it comes from psychiatrists. Psychiatrists mostly publish in journals and speak at conferences, which leaves a gap in the public space. A space that is in turn filled by influencers, entertainment media, and commentators with no clinical training which increases the risk of spreading misinformation. This commentary argues that the inaccurate information filling that gap should be treated the way we treat other threats to population health. What the public hears shapes whether people recognize symptoms, whether they believe treatment works, and whether they ask for help. Careless portrayals of suicide have been linked to real increases in suicides. And false information spreads faster and further online than accurate information does, meaning that the academic psychiatry's usual way of correcting the record, with peer-reviewed publications and professional meetings, cannot keep up.
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Why is it important?
Universities reward a peer-reviewed paper on stigma. They give no credit for an essay that corrects stigmatizing coverage while people are still reading it, or for a video that accurately explains how antidepressants work to an audience of millions. So academic psychiatrists, especially early in their careers, have very little reason to do that work — which is why so little of what the public hears comes from people trained to treat these illnesses. Telling academic psychiatrists to engage the public more has not worked, because the incentives have not changed. In this commentary I propose a way to change the incentives: recognize public communication as scholarship, teach it in training programs, weigh it in promotion decisions, and protect the people who do it. The stakes are visible in clinic every week — patients arriving with diagnoses they learned from short-form video, families choosing treatments based on a celebrity's story, people deciding whether to seek help at all based on coverage the field had no hand in shaping.
Perspectives
If this is a health problem rather than an image problem, then correcting should be part of an academic for psychiatrist's job, and credited as such. The paper proposes that public-facing work counts as scholarship when it meets scholarly standards: grounded in current evidence with sources readers can check, open to expert review and correction, and honest about uncertainty rather than drifting into advocacy. It also takes the risks seriously — oversimplifying complex evidence, platforms that reward outrage over accuracy, and the harassment that junior faculty face when they speak up.
Michael Roy
American Psychiatric Association
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Mental Health Misinformation as a Public Health Problem: The Case for Psychiatric Public Scholarship, American Journal of Psychiatry, September 2026, American Psychiatric Association,
DOI: 10.1176/appi.ajp.20260522.
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