'The mythological marauding violent schizophrenic': Using the word sketch tool to examine representations of schizophrenic people as violent in the British press

James Balfour

doi:10.18573/jcads.10

Abstract

Combining theories and methods from Corpus Linguistics and Critical Discourse Analysis, this article examined grammatical collocates of the lemma SCHIZOPHRENIC (n.) relating to violence in a 15 million word corpus of U.K. national newspaper texts. Using the Word Sketch tool via the online toolbox SketchEngine, it isolated several relatively formulaic lexico-grammatical patterns. SCHIZOPHRENIC co-occurred unusually frequently with modifiers relating to perceived dangerousness and, when grammatical subject, with verbs referring to violent actions. The analysis noted incidentally that, when predicated by the intransitive verb DIE, some examples referred to stories where schizophrenics were killed by police or medical staff, and grammatical agency was obscured.). Other modifiers of SCHIZOPRENIC referred to examples of ‘lay diagnoses’ which were based solely on evidence of violent behaviour. Almost all instances of reported speech ascribed to SCHIZOPHRENIC referred to the admission of violent crime or the lurid and inaccurate representation of psychotic symptoms. Lastly, SCHIZOPHRENIC was grammatically co-ordinated unusually frequently with social groups defined by their violent behaviour. The article concluded by arguing that while the label SCHIZOPHRENIC (n.) is problematic owing to its evident negative semantic prosody, charities and medical professionals should work towards changing the negative misconceptions revealed by identified patterns rather than simply discouraging use of the label.

Highlights

Schizophrenia spectrum disorders are characterised by symptoms such as delusions, hallucinations and disorganised thinking (American Psychiatric Association, 2013, p. 89)
3 The findings reported here are part of a larger project examining how people with schizophrenia are represented using language in the British press between 2000 and 2015, which was funded by the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences (FASS), which is affiliated with the CASS (Corpus Approaches to Social Science) centre at Lancaster University
The only textual evidence that Sean Rigg was killed at all is found in the following paragraph, where police officers are referred to as having used unsuitable force after arresting Mr Rigg. To see whether these three examples were part of a broader tendency to obscure grammatical agency when reporting on violence inflicted on schizophrenic people, I examined all articles in the corpus in which the names Sean Rigg, Colin Holt, and David Bennett occurred

Summary

Introduction

Schizophrenia spectrum disorders are characterised by symptoms such as delusions, hallucinations and disorganised thinking (American Psychiatric Association, 2013, p. 89). Recent studies published in psychiatry and health journals have, in particular, criticised 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 schizo - Balfour (2019) ‘The mythological marauding violent schizophrenic’: using the word sketch tool to examine representations of schizophrenic people as violent in the British press. 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. People with schizophrenia have been shown to differ in the extent to which they feel their diagnosis forms a main part of their identity, suggesting that different people may choose to identify with different labels (Tucker, 2009)

Theoretical and methodological considerations

Analysis

Findings

Conclusions