Stigma: the representation of mental health in UK newspaper Twitter feeds

Abstract

Background

The press’ representation of mental illness often includes images of people as dangerous, and there is evidence that this contributes to stigmatising understandings about mental illness. Little is known about how newspapers portray mental health on their Twitter feeds.

Aim

To explore the representation of mental health in the UK national press’ Twitter feeds.

Method

Content analysis was used to code the Tweets produced by UK national press in two time periods, 2014 and 2017. Chi-square analysis was used to identify trends.

Results

The analysis identified a significant reduction in the proportion of tweets that were characterised as Bad News between 2014 and 2017 (χ² = 14.476, d.f.=1, p < 0.001) and a significant increase in the tweets characterised as Understanding (χ² = 9.398, d.f.=1, p = 0.002). However, in 2017, 24% of the tweets were still characterised as Bad News. Readers did not retweet Bad News stories significantly more frequently than they were produced.

Conclusions

There is a positive direction of travel in the representations of mental health in the Twitter feeds of the UK press, but the level of Bad News stories remains a concern.

Keywords:

• Stigma
• twitter; social media; media; newspaper

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Data sharing

The data that support the findings of this study are available from the corresponding author, Matt Bowen, upon reasonable request.