The victim, the wicked and the ignored: Representation of mentally ill perpetrators of violent crime in news reports in the Norwegian, Swedish and Lithuanian press

News media reporting on mental illness in western countries shows that mentally ill persons are mostly portrayed as dangerous and as perpetrators of violent crimes. A comparison with news media in a post-Soviet nation shows the same result. A Lithuanian non-govermental organization initiated a quantitative analysis on media reporting on mentally ill persons in comparison with Norway and Sweden. The most common topic in all three nations was violent crime stories. The article discusses some of these results from the quantitative study of 566 news articles in autumn 2008, and offers a deepened discussion about the reporting on violent crime stories with a mentally ill perpetrator via an exploratory qualitative analysis of one violent crime case from each nation.