Health policy
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Mental disorders are a major contributor to the disease burden in Europe. We studied how research on them was communicated to British and Irish newspaper readers through an analysis of stories in the Daily Mail (DML) and The Guardian (GDN) in the UK and the Irish Times (IET) in Ireland, in 2002-13, and whether the coverage reflected the relative burdens of mental disorders, or the amount of research, in the two countries. The cited papers were identified through the newspapers' archive or the Factiva database, and their details and those of the research they cited from the Web of Science, with 1,128 stories in total. ⋯ The UK newspapers had many stories on lifestyle factors (DML) or drug treatments (GDN); IET gave more space to epidemiology. The UK papers gave little attention to non-drug treatments. Many stories quoted commentators, who in the UK were often charities, but the IET tended to use academics.