Chapter 8 explores the ways in which the press talk about people having mental illness using a mixed-methods approach. In the chapter, the frequency and semantic and pragmatic content of the verbs ‘suffer’ and ‘ experience’ in the context of prescribed forms for talking about having mental illness are investigated. I show that ‘suffer’ and ‘experience’ occur in different semantic contexts in the MI 1984–2014 Corpus as well as general language corpora, which may contribute to ‘suffer’ being a more problematic term for describing mental health than ‘experience’. Moreover, I show that ‘suffer’ is proportionally less likely to be used in first-person narratives because ‘suffering’ is attributed to people with mental illness by others, for example, medical professionals, in reported speech. I bring together my findings in a set of lexicogrammatical heuristics based on the semantic content of ‘suffer’ and ‘experience’ in context (e.g. whether the word encodes animacy or is temporally bounded).

Chapter 7 explores the labels associated with mental illness in more detail, specifically through naming analysis. I discuss prescribed forms for referring to people with mental illness (such as person-first language) and explore the frequency of such prescribed forms in the corpus. In addition, salient naming strategies in the corpus, particularly the labels ‘patient’, ‘sufferer’ and ‘victim’ are investigated. Using corpus evidence, I show that these labels are patterned to specific illness types. Furthermore, I argue that the tendency in the corpus to refer to people as quantities and statistics depersonalises people with mental illness. I argue that the ‘rhetoric of quantification’ (Fowler, 1991: 166) provides a way for the press to sensationalise news events related to mental illness which in turn constitutes the representation of mental illness as a ‘moral panic’ (Cohen, 1973).

Chapter 2 provides a review of the existing literature on the representation of, and attitudes towards, mental illness in a variety of text types (e.g. online data, newspaper data, spoken data) and across a range of analytical disciplines. In addition to exploring research on the representation of mental illness in these different data types and disciplines, the theoretical position of Social Constructionism (particularly in reference to CDA) is discussed.

Chapter 9 investigates if and how the symptoms of mental illness are present in the MI 1984–2014 Corpus by exploring the symptoms of each disorder type covered by the corpus. Specifically, using keyword and key semantic domain analysis, I explore whether the symptoms of mental illnesses are accurately represented in news articles on mental illness. In addition to corpus tools, I also qualitatively analyse the most prototypical text for each illness subcorpus (i.e. the text that contains the most frequent features of the illness subcorpus overall) to explore whether the keyness findings are also a feature of whole texts.

In this chapter, I show that mental health and illness is an increasingly important topic in UK society, both in terms of the number of newspaper articles covering mental illness-related issues and the increased prevalence of mental illness generally. I also show how the public are increasingly aware of the language used to discuss mental illness in the press. Moreover, I explain how the language used to discuss mental illness is being increasingly prescribed by anti-stigma initiatives. Despite anti-stigma activities and initiatives, very little research exists that explores the language used to discuss mental illness in the press using a purely linguistic approach. For this reason, I set out the research gap in the existing literature that this book goes some way to addressing. I also introduced the MI 1984–2014 Corpus and provide an outline for the rest of this book.

Chapter 4 provides an overview of Analytical Methods in Critical Discourse Analysis, covering the early manifestations of linguistic inquiry into ideology in texts such as that of the East Anglia School (Fowler et al., 1979) to contemporary research into corpus-assisted discourse analysis that combines these early principles of CDA with computational methods. The notion that the automation of textual analysis offered by corpus linguistics provides a magic bullet for objectivity in CDA is discussed and contested. The different CDA methods used in the book are outlined. Specifically, Halliday’s transitivity model, taken from his model of Systemic Functional Linguistics (2003 [1973]), and naming analysis are discusssed and exemplified using relevant data.

Chapter 3 provides a brief overview of the particular approach to corpus linguistics adopted in this book: namely, corpus linguistics as a method (as opposed to corpus linguistics as a theory) (McEnery & Hardy, 2012; Tognini-Bonelli, 2001). The specific corpus linguistic analytical methods used, such as collocation and keyness analysis, and the statistical tests and cut-offs associated with each analysis type are detailed. Using data from the MI 1984–2014 Corpus (specifically the data collected during a pilot study and an illness-specific sample of the data), each analytical method used is exemplified. The utility of each analysis type for analysing ideology in texts is also discussed.

This chapter investigates the extent to which the #FeesMustFall social movement protests of 2015 and 2016 at the University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa, used violence as an ideological weapon to cause social change in the higher education sector. Applying thematic analysis of interviews conducted with eleven stakeholders (including student activists, university management staff, academic union, and government representatives), and data from tweets collected between October 8 and 20, 2015 and September 19 and October 11, 2016, the chapter argues that the movement used violence to disrupt the inherent systematic violence of the state and university space that has hindered students’ socioeconomic and cultural development. Results further show that the movement’s adoption of violence was influenced by Franz Fanon’s “On Violence,” which resulted in the contestation of ideas by the different stakeholders on ways of achieving social change.

Critiques of NATO’s involvement in the Libyan crisis have argued that a sober understanding of the intervention in Libya will only come to light through future studies on those that manipulated information about the conflict. However, no empirical evidence exists on the actual textual structures and strategies brought to bear by journalists in the discursive reproduction of the framework that allegedly guided the involvement of Western powers in the uprising in Libya that eventually led to a civil war in 2011. This chapter examines textual structures and discourse strategies used by CNN between February 14, 2011 and October 31, 2011 – the period General Muammar Gadhafi was killed. The authors propose new questions that may inspire arguments on whether semantic, narrative, and pragmatic acts had impacted on attitudes that validated and inspired the war in Libya.