Moral Framing of Mental Health Discourse and Its Relationship to Stigma: A Comparison of Social Media and News

Mental health discussions on public forums influence the perceptions of people. Negative consequences may result from hostile and “othering” portrayals of people with mental disorders. Adopting the lens of Moral Foundation Theory (MFT), we study framings of mental health discourse on Twitter and News, and how moral underpinnings abate or exacerbate stigma. We adopted a large language model based representation framework to score 13,277,115 public tweets and 21,167 news articles against MFT’s five foundations. We found discussions on Twitter to demonstrate compassion, justice and equity-centered moral values for those suffering from mental illness, in contrast to those on News. That said, stigmatized discussions appeared on both Twitter and News, with news articles being more stigmatizing than tweets. We discuss implications for public health authorities to refine measures for safe reporting of mental health, and for social media platforms to design affordances that enable empathetic discourse.