A Comparison of the Psycholinguistic Styles of Schizophrenia-Related Stigma and Depression-Related Stigma on Social Media: Content Analysis

Background Stigma related to schizophrenia is considered to be the primary focus of antistigma campaigns. Accurate and efficient detection of stigma toward schizophrenia in mass media is essential for the development of targeted antistigma interventions at the population level. Objective The purpose of this study was to examine the psycholinguistic characteristics of schizophrenia-related stigma on social media (ie, Sina Weibo, a Chinese microblogging website), and then to explore whether schizophrenia-related stigma can be distinguished from stigma toward other mental illnesses (ie, depression-related stigma) in terms of psycholinguistic style. Methods A total of 19,224 schizophrenia- and 15,879 depression-related Weibo posts were collected and analyzed. First, a human-based content analysis was performed on collected posts to determine whether they reflected stigma or not. Second, by using Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count software (Simplified Chinese version), a number of psycholinguistic features were automatically extracted from each post. Third, based on selected key features, four groups of classification models were established for different purposes: (a) differentiating schizophrenia-related stigma from nonstigma, (b) differentiating a certain subcategory of schizophrenia-related stigma from other subcategories, (c) differentiating schizophrenia-related stigma from depression-related stigma, and (d) differentiating a certain subcategory of schizophrenia-related stigma from the corresponding subcategory of depression-related stigma. Results In total, 26.22% of schizophrenia-related posts were labeled as stigmatizing posts. The proportion of posts indicating depression-related stigma was significantly lower than that indicating schizophrenia-related stigma (χ 2 1 =2484.64, P <.001). The classification performance of the models in the four groups ranged from .71 to .92 (F measure). Conclusions The findings of this study have implications for the detection and reduction of stigma toward schizophrenia on social media.