Original title: The broken brain? Prevalence and consequences of brain framing of mental disorders
Olha Guley, Sanil Shashank Pandhare, Elena Pasquinelli, Daniel Nettle · September 2026
People often talk about mental disorders as if they are purely broken brains. Researchers wanted to know how common this message is and how it shapes the way we think. They analyzed tens of thousands of newspaper articles and ran experiments where people read different descriptions of mental disorders. They found that this brain framingDescribing mental disorders as brain disorders. has grown rapidly since 1980, and even faster since 2004. Hearing mental disorders described this way changes people's views. It makes them believe more in genetic and biological causes. It also makes them trust medication more as a treatment. However, it makes them doubt psychological and environmental causes. Overall, simple shifts in language strongly guide how the public understands mental health.
Imagine you are deciding whether to trust a friend's apology. The exact words they use change what you hear: one phrasing sounds like blame, another sounds like remorse, even if the underlying event is the same. The hard part is that the same situation can be understood completely differently depending on the words. Here, the situation is a mental disorder, and the words are whether it is described as a brain disorder. That choice alone shifts whether people blame biology or life circumstances, and whether they think medication will help.
How we talk about mental illness is not neutral. If calling a disorder a brain disorder makes people trust medication more but not therapy, it shapes what patients, families, and doctors believe about treatment. Journalists and public figures choose this language, so it affects anyone who reads about mental health.
The abstract reports that effects on recovery pessimism varied across studies and disorders, and no robust effects appeared for age of onset, duration, severity, or psychotherapy efficacy. It does not show whether these belief changes translate into actual treatment decisions or long-term attitudes. The text analysis covers only New York Times articles, so the prevalence trend may not generalize to all media.
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The broken brain? Prevalence and consequences of brain framing of mental disorders — Olha Guley, Sanil Shashank Pandhare, Elena Pasquinelli et al. — PsyArXiv — doi:10.31234/osf.io/8gny5_v2
Abstract licence: CC BY
Explanation generated by Synthesis from the abstract — it is not the original paper. This is a preprint, so it hasn't necessarily been peer reviewed.