Media Coverage of Mental Illness and the Reproduction of Social Stigma

In South Korea, media coverage of incidents involving mental illness has been continuous and pervasive, raising concerns that it may foster biased public discourse about specific disorders and reinforce social stigma. This study examines how major news outlets have represented mental illnesses—and how those representations have changed over time—focusing on schizophrenia, depression, and bipolar disorder in articles published by six leading Korean newspapers (Chosun Ilbo, Dong-A Ilbo, Hankyoreh, Kyunghyang Shinmun, Hankook Ilbo, and Seoul Shinmun) from January 1, 1960 to December 31, 2024. The study period begins in 1960, when Western-style psychiatry became institutionally established in Korea and mental illness began circulating as a matter of public discourse through mass media. Using BigKinds, the NAVER News Library, and web crawling, we collected 53,051 articles (6,425 on schizophrenia; 43,719 on depression; 2,907 on bipolar disorder) and conducted TF–IDF word-frequency analysis and BERTopic-based topic modeling to identify dominant representational patterns and their temporal trajectories.

Across all three disorders, high-frequency terms consistently mixed medical-context words such as ‘mental’, ‘treatment’, and ‘patient’ with negative terms including ‘crime’, ‘suicide’, and ‘incident’. Schizophrenia and bipolar disorder were especially reported through the lens of serious crimes and accidents, while depression coverage was strongly tied to suicide. Using the BERTopic model, schizophrenia coverage was classified into topics including crime-related trials, violent crime, art, and social health issues. Bipolar disorder coverage concentrated on incidents, accidents, and celebrity figures, whereas depression appeared across broader social contexts—including art, pharmaceuticals, social trauma, and sexual violence.

Temporal analysis revealed that crime- and incident-centered reporting increased markedly following specific triggering events: schizophrenia coverage spiked after the 2016 Gangnam Station murder; depression coverage surged following the 2009 Jang Ja-yeon suicide case and the 2018 Gangseo PC Room murder; and bipolar disorder coverage intensified around high-profile cases involving public figures in 2013 and 2019. Analysis of media partisanship showed that conservative outlets more prominently featured crime- and incident-centered topics in coverage of bipolar disorder and depression. In schizophrenia coverage, however, crime-related topics ranked relatively high across all outlets regardless of political orientation, suggesting that stigmatizing frames around schizophrenia transcend ideological boundaries. Progressive outlets tended to contextualize mental illness within structural and social conditions, while centrist outlets displayed a more pragmatic balance between medical and incident-based framing.

These reporting patterns risk reinforcing social stigma and distancing individuals with mental illness from appropriate treatment and social support. This study highlights the importance of examining how media representations of mental illness are structured over time, and urges a shift toward more balanced, rights-based, and medically informed reporting on mental health in Korea.