• What's the Story? Reporting mental health and suicide
• At a glance
• The handbook
  • Foreword
  • Introduction
  • Key facts about mental health
  • Care in and out of the community
  • Reporting mental health and violence
  • Violence: the other side of the story
  • Reporting suicide
  • Language and terminology
  • Industry codes of practice
  • Diagnoses
  • Contacts
• Shift Media Network

Language and terminology

Choose your words carefully

“We stand in relation to some aspects of mental health – particularly in the way we refer to mental illness, in the language that we use and misuse – roughly where we stood in relation to race 20 or 30 years ago. The least we can do is to accept that language used about mental illness is important and reflect this in the practice of our trade.”
Ian Mayes, Associate Editor and former Readers’ Editor, The Guardian

Getting it right: style guide

Words matter. The more contentious the issue, the louder the debates and disagreements about the right language to use. This section briefly sets out some of the preferred language to use about mental health.

• Avoid using offensive expressions like ‘loony’, ‘psycho’, ‘schizo’ and ‘nutter’ when referring to someone with a mental health problem. They stereotype and stigmatise – and their use may breach the PCC code and other codes of practice.
• Try to avoid writing ‘the mentally-ill’ – say mental health patients or people with mental health problems.
• Defining people by a diagnosis – ‘a schizophrenic’ or ‘a depressive’ – can cause offence. People are more than their mental health problem.
• ‘A person with’ is clear, accurate and preferable to ‘a person suffering from’.
• ‘Schizophrenic’ should not be used to mean ‘two minds’ or to refer to a ‘split personality’ – this is an incorrect use of the term.
• ‘Schizophrenia’ has become the ‘illness metaphor of choice’ in the Press. It is used metaphorically to imply chaos and unpredictability 50 times more often than the term ‘cancer’, according to research (Schizophrenia, an Illness and a Metaphor: Analysis of the Use of the Term ‘Schizophrenia’ in the UK National Newspapers; A Chopra and G Doody, Journal of the Royal Science of Medicine 2007), reinforcing negative perceptions of the illness.
• Secure psychiatric hospitals are not prisons – residents are patients, not prisoners or inmates. When they leave, they are discharged, not released (see Press Complaints Commission Code guidance in the next section).

“I’m very conscious of the way we all abuse mental health terminology. It actually causes great discomfort to people when we use words like ‘schizophrenic’ as a metaphor in casual discourse about issues that have nothing to do with mental health.”
Jon Snow, Channel 4 News

What's the Story: Reporting mental health and suicide: A resource for journalists and editors