ArticleDrug and alcohol dependence2023
Trends in stigmatizing language about addiction: A longitudinal analysis of multiple public communication channels.
Article in Drug and alcohol dependence, 2023. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 10 papers.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
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Who cites it
10 citing papers in PubMed.
- Mapping and measuring addiction recovery: Recommended protocols through the PHENX toolkit.Drug and alcohol dependence · 2026Review
- From language matters to stigma-free communication in diabetes: Evolution, challenges, and next steps.Diabetic medicine : a journal of the British Diabetic Association · 2026Review
- It's Not Really the Words; It's How They Land: Lived Experience Perspectives on the Use of Language and Labels in Mental Health.International journal of environmental research and public health · 2026Article
- Representation of drug addiction in Pakistani print media: A Latent Dirichlet Allocation analysis.PloS one · 2026Article
- Utility of substance-free alternatives in treating and preventing harmful substance use: A narrative review of the translational research spectrum.Drug and alcohol dependence reports · 2025Review
- "Either way, they will use. And so, probably, would you:" A critical discourse analysis of harm reduction portrayal in United States opinion news media.The International journal on drug policy · 2025Article
- Large-Scale Analysis of Online Questions Related to Opioid Use Disorder on Reddit.Proceedings of the ... International AAAI Conference on Weblogs and Social Media. International AAAI Conference on Weblogs and Social Media · 2025Article
- Public health impact and harm reduction implications of xylazine-involved overdoses: a narrative review.Harm reduction journal · 2023Review
- A Content Analysis of Xylazine-associated Stigma in Web-based Media Driven by the Zombie Term and Stigmatizing Imagery.Journal of addiction medicineArticle
- Pediatricians' Attitudes Toward and Use of Terminology About Mothers With Opioid Use Disorder.Journal of addiction medicineArticle
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
5 authors.
Funding
Abstract
introductionStigma 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.
methodsUsing 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.
resultsThe 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.
conclusionsUse 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.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.