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Portrayals of mental illness in the media reportedly highlight violence and crime by the 'mentally ill'. Using a discourse analytic approach we investigated representations of 'depression' in the print media in Australia during the year 2000. Unlike other 'mental illnesses', in the case of depression the media stress the need for the protection of the sufferer, rather than others. Three key discourses are identified -the biomedical, the psycho-social and the administrative/managerial -which work to normalise depression by presenting it as beyond the control of the afflicted individual: a consequence of faulty brain chemistry or the product of social conditions. These discourses work together to produce unhappiness as individualised pathology in need of management through biological, psychological or social structural controls.

Level of Service (LS) is one of the most widely used general risk and need assessment tools in criminal justice agencies across North America. However, there is significant interstudy variability in the magnitude of the validity estimates. This study was conducted to examine possible sources of this variability. The predictive validity of LS risk and need increased with length of follow-up period and with investigator allegiance to LS. The combination of these two variables reveals consistent increases in mean predictive validity estimates from modest (in the .20s) through large (in the mid .30s) to very large (in the .40s) in samples of both male and female offenders. We hypothesized that the "allegiance effect" reflects the integrity of LS implementation and support provided by the agency for risk assessment. This is akin to the difference between "demonstration projects" and "practical" rehabilitation programming in the offender treatment research. Moreover, controls for Canadian versus non-Canadian evaluations reduced the effect of allegiance and length of follow-up to nonsignificant levels. Possible explanations for these findings include the degree of integrity in conducting risk and need assessments, the accuracy of recidivism as the criterion measure, and generalizability across international boundaries.

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