The rising tide of pink balloons, flags and ribbons means that Breast Cancer Awareness Month is upon us. Of all the annual health promotion campaigns, breast cancer awareness is by far the most visible and probably the most successful. The pink ribbon has come to represent one of the 21st century’s most celebrated public health initiatives. Even so, there remains room for improvement.
At what age is a woman most likely to get breast cancer? In her twenties, thirties, forties, fifties, sixties, seventies, eighties or older, or is age irrelevant? This question has been posed to thousands of people, across several countries, and the vast majority of us get it wrong.
The question was first put to British women by researchers at Oxford University in 2007. Most respondents, 56 per cent, answered “age doesn’t matter”, which is incorrect. The second most popular response, given by about 21 per cent of people, was “ in her fifties”, which is also incorrect. In fact, less than 1 per cent of the British women surveyed actually gave the correct answer: “A woman is most likely to get breast cancer in her eighties or older.”
So why, with our month-long awareness campaigns, do we get this so wrong? Are all those pink balloons and glossy leaflets a waste of time? Of course not. These campaigns undoubtedly provide life-saving information, and have contributed greatly to early detection and prevention. So why do we get the question of age wrong?
One idea is that our campaigns tend to overuse images of relatively young women. A picture is worth a thousand words, and the disproportionate use of young women as campaign models silently and unintentionally influences our ideas about age-related risk.
Less than 4 per cent of breast cancer cases are diagnosed in women under the age of 40, but it’s these women – the relatively young – who typically become the public face of the illness.
A cursive glance at the “poster girls” of the campaign and the related media coverage will confirm this idea. For more formal confirmation, however, we can look to research undertaken at Washington University in the United States. Researchers there found that 84 per cent of breast cancer cases depicted in American magazines over a five-year period featured women under the age of 50.
This disproportionate depiction of young women is not inconsequential; it might lead to a situation where older women are lulled into complacency, imagining breast cancer to be younger women’s problem. This is even more of an issue when we consider that the older woman’s risk for the illness increases with each passing year.
If we take a step back, there is a lot to be learnt from this highly successful campaign. Other awareness campaigns are almost invisible by comparison. For example, October 10 was World Mental Health Day and I’m sure many people didn’t even notice.
This is a lost opportunity since the number of people affected by mental health problems has increased significantly in recent decades. In some nations, one of the leading causes of death for young people aged 15 to 24 is suicide. In the US, suicide is the second most common cause of death for young people, just behind road traffic accidents.
For every one young person who died from breast cancer, around 100 took their own lives. Not all suicides can be attributed to mental health problems, but a great many of them can. It’s time for a mental health awareness month, one that is invested with the same kind of energy, creativity and enthusiasm that we so rightly lavish on breast cancer awareness.
Justin Thomas is an associate professor of psychology at Zayed University and author of Psychological Well-Being in the Gulf States
On Twitter: @DrJustinThomas
