How do South African newspapers frame schizophrenia and other psychotic disorders?

Abstract Background: The way schizophrenia is portrayed in the media contributes to the dissemination of misinformation about the symptoms, causes, and treatment of the mental disorder. The framing of news stories has the potential to perpetuate or mitigate the stigmatization of schizophrenia. While research on the news media’s role in exacerbating or mitigating the stigmatization of schizophrenia has been conducted widely in other contexts, our search did not yield any study on media framing of schizophrenia in South Africa. Therefore, this study uses the framing theory to investigate the media framing of schizophrenia in the South African context. Methods: We examined 216 news stories that covered the schizophrenia spectrum and other psychotic disorders from 20 South African newspapers retrieved from the SABINET – SA Media online archive over a 10-year period (2004–2014). Thematic analysis was used to analyse the news stories.Results: The findings show that most of the news stories had problems as their main frame. These were followed by stories framed to diagnose the causes of schizophrenia and other psychotic disorders; and stories that made moral judgements about issues around the schizophrenia spectrum and other psychotic disorders. Stories that were classified as suggesting remedies were relatively less frequent. Problems and causes were the dominant frames each year for the 11year period. Suggested remedies were shown to be the least reported each year. Nonetheless we observed fluctuations across the years of analysis.Conclusions: The study underscores the potential role of media analyses in framing schizophrenia and other psychotic disorders. We found that using the framing perspective as a way of identifying the primary themes or ideas presented in print media was very useful. Our findings highlight the need for collaboration between researchers and the media to enhance opportunities for improved and more nuanced reporting of mental health issues.