Joseph Adam J, Tandon Neeraj, Yang Lawrence H, Duckworth Ken, Torous John, Seidman Larry J, Keshavan Matcheri S
Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, United States.
Department of Epidemiology, Columbia University, New York, NY, United States.
Schizophr Res. 2015 Jul;165(2-3):111-5. doi: 10.1016/j.schres.2015.04.009. Epub 2015 Apr 30.
The role and prevention of stigma in mental illness is an area of evolving research.
The present study is the first to examine the use and misuse of the word 'schizophrenia' on Twitter.com in comparison with another illness (diabetes) by analyzing Tweets that use the adjective and noun forms of schizophrenia and diabetes.
Tweets containing one of four search terms (#schizophrenia, #schizophrenic, #diabetes, #diabetic) were collected over a forty-day time period. After establishing inter-rater reliability, Tweets were rated along three dimensions: medical appropriateness, negativity, and sarcasm. Chi square tests were conducted to examine differences in the distributions of each parameter across illnesses and across each word form (noun versus adjective).
Significant differences were seen between the two illnesses (i.e., among "schizophrenia", "schizophrenic", "diabetes", and "diabetic") along each parameter. Tweets about schizophrenia were more likely to be negative, medically inappropriate, sarcastic, and used non-medically. The adjective ("schizophrenic") was more often negative, medically inappropriate, sarcastic, and used non-medically than the noun "schizophrenia." Schizophrenia tweets were more likely to be negative and sarcastic when used non-medically and in a medically inappropriate manner.
Our findings confirm the presence of a great deal of misuse of the term schizophrenia on Twitter, and that this misuse is considerably more pronounced by the adjectival use of the illness. These findings have considerable implications for efforts to combat stigma, particularly for youth anti-stigma efforts.
精神疾病中污名的作用及预防是一个不断发展的研究领域。
本研究首次通过分析使用“精神分裂症”和“糖尿病”形容词及名词形式的推文，来考察推特网站上“精神分裂症”一词的正确使用和误用情况，并与另一种疾病（糖尿病）进行比较。
在四十天的时间段内收集包含四个搜索词（#精神分裂症、#精神分裂症患者、#糖尿病、#糖尿病患者）之一的推文。在确定评分者间信度后，推文沿着三个维度进行评分：医学适宜性、消极性和讽刺性。进行卡方检验以考察各参数在不同疾病及不同词形（名词与形容词）之间分布的差异。
在每个参数上，两种疾病（即“精神分裂症”“精神分裂症患者”“糖尿病”和“糖尿病患者”）之间均存在显著差异。关于精神分裂症的推文更有可能是消极的、医学上不恰当的、讽刺性的且非医学用途的。形容词（“精神分裂症患者”）比名词“精神分裂症”更常具有消极性、医学上不恰当、讽刺性且为非医学用途。当以非医学方式且医学上不恰当地使用时，关于精神分裂症的推文更有可能是消极和讽刺性的。
我们的研究结果证实了推特上存在大量对“精神分裂症”一词的误用，并且这种误用在该疾病的形容词用法中更为明显。这些发现对消除污名的努力，尤其是对青少年反污名努力，具有重要意义。
