Stigma: the representation of anorexia nervosa in UK newspaper Twitter feeds

A bibliometric analysis of media coverage of mental disorders between 2002 and 2022

PURPOSE

Mental disorders are a public health concern with media as a primary source of information. This study aims to present current research on how the media reports mental disorders.

METHODS

This study conducted a bibliometric analysis of 130 published studies on media coverage of mental disorders, focusing on the research themes and research trends of the published studies.

RESULTS

The results show that media coverage of mental disorders was generally negative and influenced by socio-demographic factors (e.g., age, gender, and cultural values). Results also show that social media was becoming crucial for mental health communication.

CONCLUSION

Media worsen the stigma against those with mental disorders, continuing prejudice and discrimination. The field has shifted from traditional media to social media, and from general to specific mental disorder descriptions.

Investigating the Content of #UequalsU on Twitter

Undetectable = Untransmittable (U = U) is the scientific fact that HIV cannot be transmitted when an individual is virally suppressed. This breakthrough discovery has the potential to greatly reduce HIV stigma and its negative effects. However, U = U is not widely known. Given that Twitter has the potential to raise awareness of health issues, the purpose of this study was to analyze the content of the #UequalsU on Twitter. The results showed that mentioning sex and mentioning love were strong predictors that a tweet would be liked and retweeted. This information could help to spread the message of U = U more widely and potentially lessen HIV stigma.

Improvement for most, but not all: changes in newspaper coverage of mental illness from 2008 to 2019 in England

AIMS

Time to Change, an anti-stigma programme in England, has worked to reduce stigma relating to mental illness in many facets of life. Newspaper reports are an important factor in shaping public attitudes towards mental illnesses, as well as working as a barometer reflecting public opinion. This study aims to assess the way that coverage of mental health topics and different mental illnesses has changed since 2008.

METHOD

Articles covering mental health in 18 different newspapers were retrieved using keyword searches on two randomly chosen days of each month in 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011, 2013, 2014, 2016 and 2019. A content analysis approach using a structured coding framework was used to extract information from the articles. Logistic regression models were used to estimate the change in odds of each hypothesised stigmatising or anti-stigmatising element occurring in 2019 compared to 2008 and 2016 with a Wald test to assess the overall significance of year as a predictor in the model. Further logistic regression models were used to assess the association between the diagnosis that an article was about and the odds that it was stigmatising, and whether this relationship is moderated by year of publication.

RESULTS

A total of 6731 articles were analysed, and there was a significant increase in anti-stigmatising articles in 2019 compared to 2008 (OR 3.16 (2.60-3.84), p < 0.001) and 2016 (OR 1.40 (1.16-1.69), p < 0.001). Of the 5142 articles that specified a diagnosis, articles about schizophrenia were 6.37 times more likely to be stigmatising than articles about other diagnoses (OR 6.37 (3.05-13.29) p < 0.001), and there was evidence that the strength of this relationship significantly interacted with the year an article was published (p = 0.010). Articles about depression were significantly less likely to be stigmatising (OR 0.59 (0.69-0.85) p = 0.018) than those about other diagnoses, while there was no difference in coverage of eating disorders v. other diagnoses (OR 1.37 (0.67-2.80) p = 0.386); neither of these relationships showed an interaction with the year of publication.

CONCLUSION

Anti-stigma programmes should continue to work with newspapers to improve coverage of mental illness. However, interventions should consider providing specific guidance and promote awareness of rarer mental illnesses, such as schizophrenia, and evaluation should examine whether reductions in stigma extend to people with all mental illness diagnoses.