Exploring Stigma Towards People with Schizophrenia in Mass Media and Their Private Discourses

Introduction

It has been shown that public stigma towards people with schizophrenia hinders their psychosocial integration. Public stigma expresses itself through lexical labels used in the print media and social networks, heightening the internalization of stigma in this population, a phenomenon known as internalised stigma or self-stigma. This paper analyses the diffusion in the mass media of two dimensions of stigma: public stigma and self-stigma.

Methods

For public stigma, we searched for the lexical labels “schizophrenia”, “schizophrenic”, “psychosis” and “psychotic” in Chilean newspapers from 2010 to 2020, and for self-stigma, we used semi-structured interviews with people with a diagnosis of schizophrenia who are users of mental health services in Santiago de Chile. The findings were organised into four categories per stigma dimension. Lexical frequencies and semantic relationships were then analysed using the UAM Corpus tool and AntConc software.

Results

The results showed frequent use of stigmatising labels in the written press, with harmful semantic associations such as violence, delinquency, unpredictability and danger.

Conclusions

Such labels tend to be accepted by those affected, evidence of their internalisation of the stigma towards the disease, and create a barrier to integration and inclusion.