QSIG Talk Recording: Grace Horwood on the discursive construction of mental health

Grace Horwood is a PhD candidate in Psychology at the University of Adelaide, South Australia.  Drawing upon the approach of Discursive Psychology, and in particular Critical Discursive Psychology, her research examines contemporary understandings of mental health and mental illness, and how these concepts are discursively constructed in institutional, media and lay contexts.  Grace's PhD is entitled 'Mental Health Communication in the Time of COVID-19'.  Her PhD research analyses how the more 'positive' concept of mental health, or mental wellbeing, was discursively constructed during the COVID-19 pandemic, in the mainstream news media and in other contexts such as an online discussion forum.  Her PhD is supervised by Professor Martha Augoustinos and Associate Professor Clemence Due.

Talk abstract

Previous research has demonstrated that mental health is highly correlated with a person’s social and economic circumstances; and the COVID-19 pandemic has made this relationship uniquely visible. In this study, we analysed how the concept of ‘mental health’ was discursively constructed in the news media in Australia during the pandemic. An approach informed by critical discourse analysis and critical discursive psychology was employed to analyse a sample of 436 articles published in daily newspapers in Australia between 1 January and 31 December 2020. Three main interpretative repertoires were identified in the data. In the first, mental health was understood as happiness or optimism. The second and third repertoires were each based around a central metaphor - mental health as a resource (‘mental wealth’), and mental health as ‘mental fitness’. Together, these repertoires functioned to construct mental health as an internal, individual reservoir of positive emotion, which individuals are responsible for maintaining. This study demonstrates that a discourse of individual responsibility for mental health is prevalent in the news media in Australia, even amid the COVID-19 pandemic, and highlights the need for communications about mental health to be designed in ways that increase understanding of the social determinants of mental health.

This talk is at an earlier time than usual as Grace is presenting from Adelaide, Australia. 

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