The Mythological Marauding Violent Schizophrenic’: Using the Word Sketch Tool to Examine Representations of Schizophrenic People As Violent In The British Press

CITATION Balfour, J. (2019). ‘The mythological marauding violent schizophrenic’: using the word sketch tool to examine representations of schizophrenic people as violent in the British press. Journal of Corpora and Discourse Studies, 2:40–64

ABSTRACT Combining theories and methods from Corpus Linguistics and Critical Discourse Analysis, this article uses Sketch Engine’s word sketch tool to examine how the British press manipulate language to represent schizophrenic people as dangerous in a 15- million-word corpus of British national newspaper articles published between 2000 and 2015. Focussing on collocates of the lexeme SCHIZOPHRENIC (n.), the analysis revealed that while modifiers explicitly characterising schizophrenic people as dangerous are infrequent, several discursive strategies operating cumulatively across multiple texts suggest that the lexeme has an implicit semantic prosody of “dangerousness” in the British press. First, SCHIZOPHRENIC exhibits a semantic preference for violent actions when in subject position, indicating that schizophrenic people as individuals are represented unusually frequently as engaging in violent behaviour. Second, there is evidence of a tendency to semi-instrumentalise schizophrenic people in terms of dangerous weapons. Third, modifiers of SCHIZOPHRENIC occur as part of lay-diagnoses, solely based on evidence of violent behaviour. Finally, SCHIZOPHRENIC is sometimes grammatically co- ordinated with other social groups perceived as dangerous. The article concludes by arguing that, while the label SCHIZOPHRENIC (n.) is problematic owing to its semantic prosody, charities and medical professionals should work towards challenging widespread misconceptions revealed in this study, rather than discouraging use of the label.

KEYWORDS schizophrenia; violence; corpus linguistics;

CDA; phraseology

1. Introduction Schizophrenia spectrum disorders are characterised by symptoms such as delusions, hallucinations and disorganised thinking (American Psychiatric Association, 2013, p. 89). Delusions refer to ‘fixed beliefs that are not amenable to change in light of conflicting evidence’ while hallucinations refer to where individuals have ‘perception-like experiences that occur without an external stimulus’, which ‘are vivid and clear, with the full force and impact of normal perceptions, and not under voluntary control’ (American Psy- chiatric Association, 2013, p. 89). Other challenges faced by people diagnosed with schizophrenia include widespread stigma towards the disorder (Dickerson et al., 2002). Individuals who internalise stigma are more likely to have low self-esteem (Wahl, 1999, Karakas? et al, 2016), be poorer (Link et al., 1987) and less likely to seek out medical treat- ment (Harrison and Gill, 2010; Sirey et al., 2001).

One of the ways this stigma manifests is through misinformed representations of schizophrenia in the media. Research has shown that the British national press typically represents people with schizophrenia as violent criminals (e.g. Schizophrenia Commis- sion Report, 2012; Clement & Foster, 2008; Chopra & Doody, 2007). Unlike other mental disorders, representations of schizophrenia in the media are getting more negative over time. Goulden et al. (2011) found that, while representations in the British press of anxi- ety and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) are becoming more positive over time, representations of people with schizophrenia remain misinformed and stigmatising. These misinformed representations in the press have been shown to shape public atti- tudes. Angermeyer et al. (2005) found that routine readers of tabloids tended to desire greater social distance from people with schizophrenia than the general population. They suggested that, as members of the public are unlikely to have first-hand experiences of people with schizophrenia, they obtain most of their information about schizophrenia from the media, which reproduces negative misconceptions.

Recent studies published in psychiatry and health journals have, in particular, criti- cised the press’ exaggerated link between people with schizophrenia and violent crime. In their metanalysis of 20 studies reporting on the risk of people with schizophrenia and other psychoses committing violent crimes, Fazel et al. (2009a) showed that, while there was an increased risk of people diagnosed with schizophrenia committing homicides, this was largely mediated by substance abuse, and that the risk posed by people with schizophrenia who abused substances was similar to the risk posed by people who abuse substances without the diagnosis. A later study (Fazel et al. 2009b, p. 2021), which factored in substance abuse, concluded that ‘the association between schizophrenia and violent crime is minimal unless the patient is also diagnosed as having a substance abuse comorbidity’. On the contrary, Brekke et al. (2001) and Teplin et al. (2005) showed that people with schizophrenia are more likely to be the victims of violent crimes than arrested as a perpetrator.

The exaggerated link between schizophrenia and violence may be a self-fulfilling prophecy. People with schizophrenia who internalise stigmatising beliefs are more likely to have self-esteem issues and are less likely to seek professional medical help (Harrison & Gill, 2010). This increases the frequency and intensity of psychotic symptoms (Goldstone et al. 2012, p. 1369) and the likelihood that people with paranoid schizophrenia will com- ply with command hallucinations, which increases the risk of them perpetrating violent crimes (Barrowcliff & Haddock, 2006). Given estimates that roughly 1% of the U.K. pop- ulation experience symptoms of schizophrenia at some point in their lives (Frith & John- stone, 2003, p. 1), the potential harm caused is significant.

To date, no research has seriously explored the role of language in how the press mis- represents people with schizophrenia as violent and dangerous. That is not to say that some scholars have not suggested language as an area of interest. Goulden et al. (2011), for instance, acknowledged that the press rarely use language that explicitly stigmatises mentally ill people, suggesting that press instead manipulate language to convey implicit meanings. Both Goulden et al. (2011) and Kalucy et al. (2011, p. 546) also suggest that it is the manner in which mental illnesses are reported on which is problematic, rather than over-reporting. The reliance on more subtle ways of representing schizophrenic people as violent may be an attempt to avoid openly violating rules put forward by the Inde- pendent Press Standard Organisation (IPSO), which dictates that the press cannot dis- criminate openly discriminate against social groups or publish inaccuracies or misleading information.1

Sketch Engine’s word sketch tool (introduced in Section 2. below) requires that the search query is a lexeme rather than a word form. Lexemes, represented using capital let- ters, consist of all the grammatical variants of a word, whereas individual word forms are represented using italics. Thus, the lexeme SCHIZOPHRENIC (n.) captures the word forms schizophrenic, schizophrenics, schizophrenic’s and schizophrenics’. This study focuses on the lex- eme SCHIZOPHRENIC (n.) over related lexemes because it directly refers to an identity, as opposed to, for instance, the abstract diagnosis SCHIZOPHRENIC (n.), or the label SCHIZOPHRENIC (adj.) that Magliano et al. (2010) have shown is also used metaphorically. That said, use of the noun SCHIZOPHRENIC, as opposed to multi-word labels such as person