#Schizophrenia: Use and misuse on Twitter

Stigmatization of individuals with mental illness is a clinical and public health concern and the prevention of stigma is an evolving research field.  Larry Yang and colleagues recently published research showing that social media can provide new avenues for the spread of stigma.  He and his colleagues compared the use of the words #schizophrenia, #schizophrenic, #diabetes, and #diabetic over a forty day period on Twitter.  A total of 1,838 Tweets containing one of these four hashtags were randomly sampled from a data set of Tweets collected over a forty day time period (12 September 2013 to 22 October 2013).  Tweets about schizophrenia were more likely to be negative, medically inappropriate, sarcastic, and used non-medically than tweets about diabetes. The adjective (“schizophrenic”) was even more often negative, medically inappropriate, sarcastic, and used non-medically. These findings have considerable implications for efforts to combat stigma, particularly for youth anti-stigma efforts.