Trends in stigmatizing language about addiction: A longitudinal analysis of multiple public communication channels

Details

• Alternative Title:
  Drug Alcohol Depend
• Personal Author:
  McLaren, Nilay ; Jones, Christopher M. ; Noonan, Rita ; Idaikkadar, Nimi ; Sumner, Steven A.
• Description:
  Introduction:
  
  Stigma associated with substance use and addiction is a major barrier to overdose prevention. Although stigma reduction is a key goal of federal strategies to prevent overdose, there is limited data to assess progress made in reducing use of stigmatizing language about addiction.
  
  Methods:
  
  Using language guidelines published by the federal National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA), we examined trends in use of stigmatizing terms about addiction across four popular public communication modalities: news articles, blogs, Twitter, and Reddit. We calculate percent changes in the rates of articles/posts using stigmatizing terms over a five-year period (2017–2021) by fitting a linear trendline and assess statistically significant trends using the Mann-Kendall test.
  
  Results:
  
  The rate of articles containing stigmatizing language decreased over the past five years for news articles (–68.2 %, p < 0.001) and blogs (–33.6 %, p < 0.001). Among social media platforms, the rate of posts using stigmatizing language increased (Twitter [43.5 %, p = 0.01]) or remained stable (Reddit [3.1 %, p = 0.29]). In absolute terms, news articles had the highest rate of articles containing stigmatizing terms over the five-year period (324.9 articles per million) compared to 132.3, 18.3, and 138.6 posts per million for blogs, Twitter, and Reddit, respectively.
  
  Conclusions:
  
  Use of stigmatizing language about addiction appears to have decreased across more traditional, longer-format communication modalities such as news articles. Additional work is needed to reduce use of stigmatizing language on social media.
  
  
• Subjects:
  Behavior, Addictive Communication Drug Overdose Humans Language Social Media Social Stigma Substance-Related Disorders
• Keywords:
  Addiction News Online Social Media Stigma
• Source:
  Drug Alcohol Depend. 245:109807
• Pubmed ID:
  36801706
• Pubmed Central ID:
  PMC10901231
• Document Type:
  Journal Article
• Funding:
  CC999999/ImCDC/Intramural CDC HHSUnited States/
• Volume:
  245
• Collection(s):
  CDC Public Access
• Main Document Checksum:
  urn:sha256:bfb50385c6c1aa26c2912f07e2efc6e6b462d312ed87232e50c952ae55e97813
• Download URL:
  https://stacks.cdc.gov/view/cdc/150372/cdc_150372_DS1.pdf
• File Type:
  [PDF - 417.61 KB ]