The Lexicon of Despair: A Critical Discourse Analysis of Mental Health Representation in Instagram Memes

Abstract

Despite their ubiquity as mental health expressions on Instagram, depression memes have not been adequately analyzed in relation to the ideas they help to propagate about the causes, agency, and treatability of mental illness. In this study, the three-dimensional Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) model by Norman Fairclough (1992, 2013) is used to analyse how intentionally selected eight Instagram depression memes produce the "lexicon of despair" a discursive system in which mental illness is constructed as an uncontrollable, enduring force, treatment as futile, and people with depression as passive, and blameworthy agents. The study suggests five recurrent discursive patterns: the minimization of the symptoms by using the informal register, the self blame attribution, the conversion of abstract concepts into symbolic figures, and the confirmation of social isolation, through reading and analysis of the text of different memes collected under the hashtag depression memes and mental health memes. These patterns are revealed to be congruent with and reinforcing the neoliberal ideology of mental afflictions becoming private and of damning collective help-seeking. Findings add to the existing scholarship on mental health communication in the digital sphere by revealing how the particular language and semiotic elements of the depression meme are used as spaces of ideology conflict around meaning, responsivity, and the possibility of treating mental illness.