People with a diagnosis of borderline personality disorder are relatively high users of inpatient and community services. There is concern, however, that mental health nurses feel negative about working with this group of people, are often socially distancing and feel under-skilled. The purpose of this research was to explore the experiences of good practice among mental health professionals working in a service that provided specialist treatment for this group of service users. The research was undertaken through semi-structured interviews and identified four key themes: shared decision making, social roles, peer support and open communication. These themes are discussed in the context of research in this field, the need for recovery-focused services, and through drawing on the Winnicotian notions of disillusionment and mirroring as key developmental processes.

The provision of better care for this client group will rely on appropriate training for nurses. This research highlights the need for training that supports the development of engagement skills, communication skills and an ability to use reflection in action as a means of providing therapeutic care. It also highlights the different emphasis on the use of these skills by forensic and non-forensic nurses.

Aims: Media representations of mental health problems may influence readers’ understanding of, and attitude towards, people who have received psychiatric diagnoses. Negative beliefs and attitudes may then lead to discriminatory behaviour, which is understood as stigma. This study explored the language used in popular national newspapers when writing about schizophrenia and considered how this may have contributed to the processes of stigmatisation towards people with this diagnosis. Methods: Using corpus linguistic methods, a sample of newspaper articles over a 24-month period that mentioned the word ‘schizophrenia’ was compared with a similar sample of articles about diabetes. This enabled a theory-driven exploration of linguistic characteristics to explore stigmatising messages, while supported by statistical tests (log-likelihood) to compare the data sets and identify words with a high relative frequency. Results: Analysis of the ‘schizophrenia’ data set identified that overtly stigmatising language (e.g. ‘schizo’) was relatively infrequent, but that there was frequent use of linguistic signatures of violence. Articles frequently used graphic language referring to acts of violence, descriptions of violent acts, implements used in violence, identity labels and exemplars of well-known individuals who had committed violent acts. The word ‘schizophrenic’ was used with a high frequency ( n = 108) and most commonly to name individuals who had committed acts of violence. Discussion: The study suggests that while the press has largely avoided the use of words that press guidance has steered them away from (e.g. ‘schizo’ and ‘psycho’), they still use a range of graphic language to present people with a diagnosis of schizophrenia as frighteningly ‘other’ and as prone to violence. This repetition of negative stereotypical messages may well contribute to the processes of stigmatisation many people who experience psychosis have to contend with.

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This article reviews research findings into the portrayal of mental health disorders in print media, with particular attention to research that uses content analysis. The findings indicate that there is diversity in the representations of mental health disorders, and that in the UK the proportion of ‘good news’ stories increased between 1992 and 2008. However, there remains an over-association of mental health disorders with dangerousness, and this is emphasised through the use of sensationalistic language and highlighting violence in newspaper headlines. These results are explored as part of the process of stigmatisation and the impact that it has on the knowledge, attitudes and behaviours of the general public; and on the lives of service users.