What is it about?
The study looked at 2,830 articles about dementia from three UK tabloid newspapers between 2013 and 2025 to see whether they followed guidelines for talking about dementia. The researchers found some improvements, such as newspapers increasingly referring to the person rather than defining them by their dementia. However, language that focused on the condition was still common. Newspapers also gave little attention to the different types of dementia and the different symptoms people can experience. Dementia was often linked with getting older, lifestyle risks, prevention, tragedy, increasing numbers of people with dementia, and financial costs. Some language that did not follow the guidelines came from experts and dementia organisations quoted in the articles, so journalists were not always the original source of this language. However, this did not explain all of the problems found in the newspaper coverage. Overall, the study found that UK tabloids still did not consistently follow dementia language guidelines. Their reporting often included ways of talking about dementia that can contribute to stigma, such as labelling people, focusing on responsibility and risk, presenting dementia as something threatening, and emphasising differences between people with and without dementia. The study also suggests that society’s strong focus on staying mentally sharp and ageing well can make dementia seem like a particularly negative way of ageing. Following language guidelines may not remove stigma by itself, but working with journalists and others involved in dementia communication could help improve how dementia is reported.
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Why is it important?
By showing how dementia-related stigma is communicated, the study provides information that health care professionals and advocacy organizations, who are among the main sources journalists rely on, can use to promote more responsible and less stigmatizing reporting.
Perspectives
I hope this study can help raise awareness of how the language used to talk about dementia can contribute to stigma and encourage more respectful and thoughtful ways of representing people living with dementia in the media.
Emilia Castaño
Department of Modern Languages and Literatures and of English Studies University of Barcelona
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Stigma communication in dementia media discourse: An analysis of U.K. tabloid representations and their alignment with dementia language guidelines., Stigma and Health, August 2026, American Psychological Association (APA),
DOI: 10.1037/sah0000717.
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