Schedule 80. StuTS

This study investigates how schizophrenia is represented in the British press from 2020-2024, examining the left politically leaning newspaper The Guardian comparative to the right politically leaning newspaper The Times. Using purpose-built corpora and sub-corpora, the project triangulates corpus linguistic techniques (collocation, keyword and concordance analyses) with corpus-informed Critical Discourse Analysis to reveal patterns in language use related to schizophrenia that may not be realised as overt discrimination or stigmatising practice. The top statistically significant 25 collocations and 30 keywords lists were qualitatively coded, with two lexical domains emerging – Medical language and Social actors. Detailed corpus-driven CDA of these findings revealed prevalent framing of schizophrenia as a legitimate medical diagnosis in both newspapers, with stigma-challenging discourses more prevalent in The Guardian (realised through clinical diagnostic framing (“diagnosed with [paranoid] schizophrenia”), person-first language encoding agency and individuality (“a person with schizophrenia”) and acknowledgement of co-morbidities (“schizophrenia and bipolar disorder”). Comparatively, in The Times, findings showed greater prevalence of stigma-reinforcing discourses (realised through condition-first language encoding genericisation (“a schizophrenic [person]”), obsolete diagnostic terminology (“paranoid schizophrenia”), and naming associated with blame (“Sutcliffe [the Yorkshire Ripper] was a paranoid schizophrenic”)). However, both newspapers showed instances of all aforementioned features, indicating that, whilst The Guardian showed greater indication of responsible, clinically-grounded reporting, the divide in representations of schizophrenia in left versus right politically leaning newspapers is not particularly marked. Furthermore, both newspapers (though more frequently The Times) constructed schizophrenia as associated with a male-centric violence rhetoric (“a schizophrenic man who stabbed his mother 33 times”), though medicalisation remained a more dominant discourse. Whilst these findings indicate schizophrenia-related reporting may have improved and now not be as problematic, negative and stigmatising as previous literature has found, more can be still be done particularly surrounding encoding individual agency of people with schizophrenia and avoiding unnecessary associations with blame, violence or a masculine rhetoric.