Talking back to mental health stigma: An exploration of YouTube comments on anti-stigma videos

Abstract

Mental illness continues to be stigmatized, creating challenges for individuals with mental illness including help-seeking hesitancy, negative impacts on personal relationships, and barriers to basic rights such as housing, finances, and education. Stigma resistance are individual and public behaviors that stigmatized individuals use to counteract the negative impacts of stigmatization.We analyzed YouTube comments on amateur videos that purport to de-stigmatize mental illness in order to determine how individuals react to such content, as well as to examine the presence of stigma resistance strategies. We collected 12,842 comments from 20 YouTube videos, of which 985 comments were randomly sampled for thematic analysis. Five themes were identified: 1) community building, 2) personal experiences of mental illness, 3) personal experiences of stigma, 4) debates of mental illness validity and 5) providing explanations for mental illness. We identified comments that suggest both positive (e.g., building relationships, sharing and validating experiences) and negative (e.g., perpetuating stigmatizing beliefs, reminding viewers of being stigmatized) outcomes of viewing purportedly anti-stigma videos on YouTube. Based on comments, it appears many viewers experienced benefits from watching videos aligned with strategies used for stigma resistance, including a sense of community and a safe space to share personal experiences.