Maritta Välimäki*, Department of Nursing Science, University of Turku; Southwest Hospital District, Finland, Turku, Finland Christina Athanasopoulou, Department of Nursing Science, University of Turku, Turku, Finland Track: Research Presentation Topic: New ethics Presentation Type: Poster presentation Submission Type: Single Presentation Last modified: 2014-10-22

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Background: While mass media are considered a primary source of information about mental illness, various studies report that they tend to present mental illness with negative portrayals. Nowadays, the Internet has become very popular among other media and an important source of information. Daily, 41% of Greek people use the Internet. Based on previous studies, the Greek general public tends to have stigmatizing attitudes towards people with schizophrenia. It is important to know how schizophrenia is reported in online media, as negative portrayals can affect public attitudes towards mental illness and also impact negatively individuals living with mental illness.

Objective: To explore how popular Greek newspaper websites report on ‘schizophrenia’.

Methods: We identified the three most popular newspaper websites. For a Greek newspaper website to be included it should be: among the top, circulated and distributed on a national level, and having a general focus. Those distributed locally and/or having a specific focus (e.g. business), were excluded even if they were among the top Greek newspaper websites. Second, on March 4th, 2014, the search term ‘schizophrenia’ in Greek language (‘σχιζοφρένεια’) was searched in the intra-site search engine of each of the three newspaper websites. Included were the first 20 results from each search (N=60), which were then collected and reviewed. Third, deductive content analysis was applied for coding and data interpretation, by using a coding tool based on previous studies (Magliano et al, 2011; Park et al, 2012; Corrigan, 2004). The coding tool included: 1) Year of publication; 2) Type of article: news, healthcare/science, politics, economy/finance, culture/entertainment/sport, other; 3) Term used in: positive/neutral, or negative way. Fourth, data was analyzed using descriptive statistics (f,%, Mean,Md,Chi2). Among the 60 included and reviewed articles, 4 were excluded as they were duplicates.

Results: Out of the included articles (N=56), most of them were published in year 2013 (73%), 19 were news (34%), 23 healthcare/science (41%), 4 politics (7%), 1 economy/finance (2%), 8 culture/entertainment (14%), and 1 other (2%). The term was mostly used in a positive/neutral way (n=40; 71%), while 29% of the articles (n=16) used the term with a negative connotation, which mostly denoted contradiction, eccentricity, incoherence, or dangerousness.

Conclusions: The majority of the collected articles presented schizophrenia positively, however, a respectful amount (29%) presented schizophrenia in a negative way. The negative connotations of ‘schizophrenia’ which were found are evident also in studies outside Greece. This suggests that a national, or even European, strategy for promoting responsible reporting of mental illness would raise awareness on that issue, and increase the amount of reported positive connotations to schizophrenia, thus, limit the stigmatizing beliefs. More research is needed to investigate the reporting on mental illness in various mass media means and especially the Internet which is easily accessible to everyone.