Forensic psychiatrist Robert Phillips, M.D., Ph.D., finds it amazing that anybody would question the malignant influence of television violence on the mental health of young Americans.

Yet if anybody questions it, he now has some ammunition to bolster his position: a national television violence survey that he helped conduct. It is the most thorough survey of the subject to date, he asserted at the annual meeting of the National Medical Association, held in Washington, D.C., in August.

Phillips, an associate professor of psychiatry and law at the University of Maryland, and his colleagues assessed violence in some 3,000 television programs aired over a nine-month period. Here are a few of the results:

• Seventy-one percent of the perpetrators of violence in these programs were human; only 12 percent were anthropomorphized animals.

• Seventy percent of the targets of human violence were humans, and 92 percent of these were heroes in the shows. This finding suggests that the good guy or gal in many television shows these days is portrayed as a victim, in contrast to a few decades ago, when the hero was usually portrayed as a protagonist in charge of his life—for example, a cowboy charging in on a white steed.

• In three-fourths of the cases where a violent act was portrayed, the persons who committed it went unpunished, implying to many viewers that this is the way things are in real life.

• Violence on television is often portrayed as humorous. As a result, many young people do not understand its real-life consequences. Or as one youngster told Phillips, "Doc, I didn’t know it would hurt to get shot!"

But the shows that may be having the most virulent effects on Americans’ mental health, Phillips opined, are not those in which outright violence is visited by one human on another, but those like "Survivor" and "Big Brother," where the viewer watches people "whittle away at each other until only one survives." Phillips pointed out how the message of these popular new shows contrast with that of a children’s program about dinosaurs that suggests that if people help each other, maybe they will all be survivors.