The media plays a crucial role in combating stigma. For years, mental health organizations have provided tools, advice, and training to prevent the media from trivializing and further stigmatizing people with mental health problems.

There are some mistakes that are repeated in the media:

• Treating mental health issues as a frequent or isolated phenomenon.
• To speak of people with a mental health diagnosis as violent, dangerous, or unpredictable.
• Using generalizing expressions, such as "the mentally ill are" or "schizophrenics behave"
• Treating people with mental health problems with compassion and paternalism.
• Confusing a mental disorder with a mental disability or dementia.
• Consider that these are disabled people, that mental disorders are incurable and that they prevent them from having a normal life.
• Illustrating information about mental health with images that convey social isolation, suffering, darkness, or that evoke compassion or rejection.
• Using schizophrenic or bipolar to refer to dual or multiple personality disorder is incorrect. Schizophrenia and bipolar disorder are not personality disorders. Schizophrenia is a psychotic disorder, and bipolar disorder is a mood disorder.