A Study On The "depression" Discourse In The Print Media Of China

Depression,as a mental disorder,has existed for a long time in human society.Up to now,the number of people suffering from depression in different fields and different age groups has increased year by year.China is a country with a high incidence of depression,nearly 80% of them have not received standard treatment,and behind them there are countless undiagnosed people.The public's understanding of depression comes largely from the cultivation of the media,depression groups have a lower survival status in the whole social context.Depression discourse research has been relatively mature in foreign countries,and most of the domestic studies on this topic are in the medical field,and few literatures have studied depression discourse in media report.This study collected the report on depression in various regions from 2000 to 2018,and conducted a comprehensive analysis via merging discourse analysis corpus approach and communication theory.The study found that the coverage of depression in the print media in East China from 2000 to 2018 was on the rise,Elite depression discourses and metaphorical depression discourses are more prominent,and medical discourse dominates the print media.The word "depression" often co-occurred with the vocabulary which contains obvious hostile or negative semantic prosody.In the discourse construction of depression in the print media of East China,the concepts of "depression" and "melancholia" are used side by side up to now.Depression patients are "stigmatized" in the print media.No matter in the event report or non event report,the stereotype of the discourse construction of depression is relatively common in East China.The strong control of the mainstream discourse and the absence of the main discourse of the depressed patients in the report provide a flexible discourse interpretation space for the operation of media discourse power.