O1.4. How the Most Cited Research Articles About Schizophrenia in 2018 Depict the Disease?

Abstract

Background Despite the progress in treatment and clinical outcomes, schizophrenia remains a highly stigmatized disease and imposes a challenge to families and patients towards recovery. Stigma can debilitate individuals as much as the disease itself, representing one of the most relevant obstacles to overcome the illness: it hinders the pursuit of autonomy and achievement of life goals. Stigma is complex and multilayered and its research usually focus on patients and society, but a lower number of studies address health professionals stigma. Even fewer investigate stigma of researchers. Thus, our objective is to analyze how the most cited research papers published in 2018 addressing schizophrenia depict the disease to identify putative stigma among researchers. Methods In this exploratory study, we conducted a search using Web of Science (WoS) with the following terms: (“patients with schizophrenia”) OR (“schizophrenia patients”). We restricted the search to articles published in 2018 and selected the 20 studies with the highest total number of citations. We identified how the authors defined schizophrenia and then categorized the definition in three groups: (1) negative perspective, in which depreciative words were used to define the disease; (2) neutral definition, in which emphasis is given to the description of epidemiological data; and (3) neutral to positive definition, when negative outcomes were listed as possibilities, not certainties. Two independent authors (G.K. and M.M.) categorized each article and eventual conflicts were solved by a third author (A.G.) Results 25% of the studies depicted a clearly negative perspective of schizophrenia. In these studies, the disease was described with words such as “devastating” and “highly disabling”. Most studies (60%) were coded as neutral, being mainly descriptive of current epidemiological data. Only 3 studies (15%) were identified as more favorable, since they acknowledged the possibility of better outcomes among patients with schizophrenia. Discussion In the current schizophrenia scientific literature, negative views of the disease are still largely common. Considering the role of highly cited papers as opinion formers, we suggest that as occurred in other fields, such as the change in address of suicide by the media, some orientation should be adopted to avoid further contributions to the schizophrenia stigma.