‘Mental Wealth’ and ‘mental Fitness’: the Discursive Construction of Mental Health in the Australian News Media During the COVID‐19 Pandemic

In this study, we analysed how the concept of 'mental health' was discursively constructed in the news media in Australia during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic. An approach informed by critical discursive psychology was employed to analyse a sample of 436 print and online articles published in daily newspapers between January 1 and December 31, 2020. Three main interpretative repertoires were identified in the data. Together, these repertoires functioned to construct mental health as an internal, individual reservoir of positive emotion, which individuals are responsible for building and maintaining. An ideological dilemma was also observed between mental health as an individual responsibility and mental health as a societal responsibility. This study demonstrates that a discourse of individual responsibility for mental health was 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. Please refer to the Supplementary Material section to find this article's Community and Social Impact Statement.