A Critical Discursive Study of Mental Health Experiences in Men

Brown, Ffion (2025) A Critical Discursive Study of Mental Health Experiences in Men. Doctoral thesis (PhD), Manchester Metropolitan University.

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Abstract

This thesis explores the stigmatisation of mental health amongst men and how this stigmatisation persists in media and public discourses. A review of the literature from both a linguistic and medical perspective identifies that mental health in men is underrepresented in both the media and in the wider society, while also acknowledging that there has been a recent increase in media presence in the aftermath of the Covid-19 pandemic. This thesis takes a two-stage approach to mental health discourse applying a mixed methods approach to language data. In this thesis, I use methodologies associated with Corpus Assisted Discourse Studies (CADS), but position myself closer to the discursive analytical side of CADS (and thus argue that the thesis is a Corpus-Aided Discourse Study), which combines corpus analysis with Critical Discourse Analysis tools to identify specific linguistic trends of mental health representation in the media. Throughout the analysis, I consider the potential impact various representations have on how men construct their own experiences with mental illness. Stage 1 of the thesis incorporates the development of a Corpus of mental health language, built from British newspapers. In this stage, I seek to determine textual-level linguistic trends on public, and regulated, constructions of mental health. These trends are applied to stage 2 which includes one-to-one, semi-structured interviews with men on their experiences with mental illness to examine if men draw upon similar linguistic constructions to discuss and frame themselves within their own experience. The headline findings of the thesis are that British newspapers draw on more negative representations, in particular when taking into account men’s mental health and the impact of mental illness on society and the workplace. Interview findings demonstrate that public representations of mental health as found in British newspapers potentially influence how men frame and construct their own experiences with mental illness. The project ultimately argues for the benefits of applying both quantitative and qualitative methods of analysis to how mental health is constructed. This thesis contributes to the previously identified gap in the literature by investigating the broader social context in which mental health representation is produced and understood in public discourses and how this relates to private discourses.