The Study Of Chinese Media Coverage Of Depression In The Perspective Of Media Constructivism

In the process of rapid revolution in modern society,all kinds of social conflicts and social pressure are exacerbated.Depression,as modern mental illness,is becoming more and more serious,which has attracted great attention due to its public health problems and social attributes.From the perspective of media constructivism,the paper analyzes depression reports of the mainstream newspapers in China from 2007 to 2016 by content analysis,framework analysis and discourse analysis.The article examines the newspaper’s news issue on depression and the construction of depressed patients’ images.The study found that:in the level of epidemiological science,on the one hand,a high degree of horror way of persuasion shaped depression as a serious developing disease with terrible consequences,creating a horrible public opinion atmosphere;on the other hand,professional science lacks,including old popular science information,professional vocabulary abuse,treatment-oriented bias and other issues.At the level of patient image construction,the media presents the negative and cruel image of depressed patients by describing their Symptoms,showing their behavior,presenting their final life;use a personal-causal framing and an individual-resolution framing to attribute the causes and solutions of Depression to individual;use the personality attribution framing to attribute the causes of patient’s abnormal behavior to Personal character.Overall,the mainstream media lacks media care for depressed patients,which constructs a group of "stigma" and"others" patients image.At the level of disease discourse,the description and analysis of the media on symptoms and causes presents two kinds of disease discourse patterns:"patient life direct experience" and "professional biomedical".The former emphasis on professional medical vocabulary,the use of objective quantitative clinical data,and the latter emphasis on depression on the patient’s daily life and the experience of the description.The paper found that there are two aspects of significance.The first is realistic importance.As an important communication channel of public health science and a major force of disease construction,the media profoundly influenced the public’s understanding of depression.Thus,pointing out the existing problems of media in the dissemination of knowledge of depression is conducive to the adjustment of mental health issues in science strategy and improvement of normative,professional and scientific nature of science knowledge.Understanding the strategies,problems and effects of the image construction of depressed patients in the media is advantage to improving the image of the media patient and eliminating the social discrimination against the depressed patients and creating a humanistic depression.The second is academic significance.At present,there are many reports on diseases in the field of communication,while reports on depression are fewer and of lower level.Combined with pathology of disease discourse and communication of news discourse,the study uses quantitative methods and qualitative analysis and has a certain degree of innovation in the method and theoretical perspective,enriched the theoretical study of disease reports.