| Mental illness is not just a medical or health issue and the range involved is not only limited to scientific knowledge and treatment technology. In different social environments, social situation, political system and ideology also play an important role in the power operation and historical development of the mental illness discourse. This study attempts to investigate the factors affecting the generation of the discourse such as power operation, social system, media development and others from the perspective of the history through the analysis of the mental illness discourse of the People's Daily and explore the relationship between these factors and the power operation of the mental illness discourse. The problems which this research wants to solve are how the party newspapers of the mainland construct the image of mental illness, how the media's understanding and construction of mental illness change in different stages of social development and how the changes are presented in the discourse of mental illness as well as how are the power operation and political environment affecting this kind of presentation like. The study wishes to not only analyze the construction of the images of mental illness but at the same time further unearth some important affecting factors in the evolution process of the mental illness discourse and analyze the correlation of the mental illness with changes of the social ideology in contemporary China from the historical dimension.The first chapter is the introduction part, introducing the origin and background of the research as well as defining the important concepts in the study. The second chapter is the literature review, combing the relevant achievements of domestic and foreign scholars in this field, which finds that there is higher academic value to explore the influence of political and ideological factors on the changes of the mental illness discourses through the dimension of history. The third chapter is the coding guideline and category construction, which is the important basis of the research content analysis.The fourth chapter is the conclusion description of the content analysis:The analysis found out that, first of all, there had been three times of significant peaks and one significant low ebb of the quantity changes of mental illness discourse samples; The three growths were right before and after the war to resist U.S. aggression and aid Korea in1953, the Falun Gong period in1999and SARS (severe acute respiratory syndrome) in2003respectively while the trough was in the cultural revolution period; The changes of the keywords associated with mental illness also reflects the changes of the stigma of this disease in China, especially after2000,"madman","psycho" and other obvious negative expressions appear less and less while the using frequency of neutral words such as "mental illness" increases.Because of the party newspaper property of the People's Daily,"important news and political" pages cover most of the mental illness samples, accounting for27.3%in total samples; In terms of the genre,"pure news" emphasizing news transmission as well as "communication or report literature" with Chinese characteristics are the most frequently used genres; In terms of the word length, there are significant differences of the changes of the sample lengths from different eras, but in general, word lengths below800words and from800to2000words are more common samples; In terms of the proportion of the discourse, samples with most of the mental discourse account for "less than10%" in People's Daily, while samples with less than10%of the psychiatric words account for62.5%of the total; There is no significant change of era in the narrative way and outlining is the expression technique which is easier to be adopted in all eras, from which it could be seen that in terms of the attention to mental illness, the proportion given by the People's Daily has been low; In terms of the sample topics, social subjects and political themes are samples with the highest frequency of mental illness discourse in People's Daily.In terms of the emphasis subject of the mental illness discourse,"the people or organization of the hostile forces" is an important emphasis subject of mental illness samples before1980s; The samples in this two year intervals account for78.1%of the total sample, which has strong ideological colors and is an important presentation of the impact of the politicized tendency on the construction of the metal illness. After the1980s, samples taking mental patients or patients with suspected mental illnesses as the main emphasis objects began to increase, samples with "typical characters" as the main body increased, but through the analysis of the main body of the report, proportion of discourse and narrative mode, we again found that the role of patients with mental illnesses in the reports on typical characters is shown as the very supporting role with very slight proportion in the text; In terms of the behavior image, psychiatric patients have the lowest frequency of positive behaviors. Since1980s, the proportion of the samples of the receivers with positive behaviors increased; In terms of the value position of mental illness discourse, there were more samples with negative value evaluations (100samples) from1946to1959and more samples with positive value evaluations from2000to2013(184samples); With the progress of the society, there is progress presented in the framework of how media and society treat mental illness discourse; In the presentation of the consequences of rendering psychiatric illnesses, the proportion of negative presentation of the consequences of rendering psychiatric illnesses decreases, which also indicates the overall ascension of our psychiatric treatment technology and social cognition as well as the more optimistic attitude of media toward this kind of disease; In terms of the news sources, except for the conditions that sources are not indicated or not clear, medical personnel and medical professionals occupy the highest proportion in specific information sources; Through the cross analysis of the year intervals and the proportion of news sources, we find that the proportion of the doctor's professional discourse and government official discourse expands constantly with the development of era.The fifth chapter is the text analysis taking the frame theory as the theoretical tool. In general, dangerous, weak, incompetent and other image constructions of people with mental illnesses run through all of the eras, which reduces the chances of the cognition and acceptance of the society. Specifically speaking, the frameworks used in different eras reflect significant changes of eras.In the1940s or1950s, the mental illness discourse paid attention to the mobilization of emotions, which could be associated with the domestic political mobilization of this period; and negative metaphor of negative words such as "madman","psycho" were used more often than the other years; The political system attribution framework was used in great quantities in the presentation of the social problems of Taiwan society and western society, constructing the media reality of "extreme misery"; During this period, there were more restrictions on the political rights of the psychiatric patients in the medium texts, revealing the "otherization" framework.There were profound political imprints in the mental illness discourse of1960s and1970s and there were more "psychosis" texts, which were mainly used to represent the event that "Su Xiu" kept dissidents in a mental hospital for political reasons; In this period, the mental illness discourse appeared a lot in the texts of the political system attribution, viewing mental illness as the consequence of the old bad social system, constructing in the form of "recall past sufferings" and strengthen the legitimacy of the present system; Because of the influence of the leaders'personal likes and dislikes, the ascension of the attention to the medical parcels, the national treatment framework was more significant than other frameworks; The treatment of mental illness presented a politicized tendency and mental illnesses were viewed as ideological and political problems.Compared with the mental illness discourses in the1960s and1970s, those in the1980s and1990s mobilized the society more to care and help people suffering from mental illnesses more; But mental patients became supporting roles in the reports with models and typical characters as the protagonists and this kind of simplified way increased the tragic and incompetent impression of catching mental illnesses; In terms of the image presentation, the dangerous framework of hurting others increased and the social cognition of treating mental patients was still objectified; The professionalism of the mental illness discourse increased, the framework of modern science and technology of medical parcels was emphasized, some reports seemed to be scientific but was a novelty in nature; Influenced by Falun Gong, superstition framework in the attribution package rose significantly during this period, which led to deeper terror association with the disease in the way of presenting the details.After2000, the reports on mental illness became more detailed and reports on depression, alzheimer and autism increased obviously; Compared to any previous period, the perception degree of the risk of catching diseases increased; Unlike any past period, the media started a new exploration in the construction of judicial rights of mental illness; Great changes in welfare policies related to mental illnesses also have taken place, reports with framework of welfare care significantly increased, the ideology tendency of mental illness discourse was no longer as clear as before and started to be revealed in implicit ways such as medical insurance for serious illnesses and other social welfares; The construction of images of people with mental illness started to convert from "otherization" in the past to "integrating into our group" at present, thus replaced that kind of moralizied and pan-politicalization image construction in the past, started to understand and construct this group in the in the concept of "disease" gradually and gradually reduced the social stigma of this disease. But due to excessive emphasis on medical words, the mental illness discourse in this period included some business discourse in medical discourse, reflected the influence of the commercialized relationship between knowledge and power.The content of the sixth chapter are conclusion summary, limitation of study and research prospect. |
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