Violence and victims: Measuring the impact of professional guidelines on representations of male schizophrenia in UK national newspapers (2013-2016)

Abstract

UK newspapers are steered towards responsible reporting by guidelines produced by organisations such as the National Union of Journalists (NUJ). Regarding mental health, these guidelines advise, amongst others, avoiding links between mental health and violence, and using stigmatising portrayals. However, adherence to these recommendations is not always consistently achieved. This study adopts a Discursive News Values Analysis (DNVA) framework (Bednarek & Caple, 2017) to examine visual and textual representations of males with schizophrenia in the UK press in light of the NUJ’s mental health guidelines. Specifically, we analyse the news values drawn upon in the text and images contained in all articles about males with schizophrenia published in The Daily Mail, The Guardian, The Independent and The Metro the year prior to and the two years following the publication of the current edition of the NUJ’s guidelines (2014). Our results show the prevalence of four news values: Consonance, Negativity, Personalisation and Positivity. These values suggest correspondence between maintaining negative stereotypes associated with schizophrenia (Consonance/Negativity) and exploring in a more positive manner the experiences of males with this condition (Personalisation/Positivity). Prior to the guidelines’ publication, textual instances of Positivity and Personalisation are more frequent than those of Consonance and Negativity across all four newspapers. However, and unexpectedly, the reverse is true following the guidelines’ publication. As for visual representations, Negativity and Personalisation feature more frequently pre-publication while, post-publication, Consonance features as frequently as Negativity. Our study concludes that uptake of the NUJ’s guidelines has been low and proposes that, to achieve more sensitive portrayals of mental health, greater use of positive, contextual details of individuals with lived experience of schizophrenia are required.