A CRITICAL DISCOURSE ANALYSIS OF MENTAL HEALTH AWARENESS IN INSTAGRAM CAPTIONS

Murni Amalia

Abstract


Mental health awareness has increasingly been communicated through social media platforms, particularly Instagram, which serves as a space for public education and advocacy. This study aims to examine how mental health awareness is discursively constructed in Instagram captions published by a mental health organization. Employing a qualitative approach, the research applies Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) based on Teun A. van Dijk’s framework to explore the underlying meanings and communicative strategies embedded within the texts. The data consist of six English-language Instagram captions posted by the account @mmha_1968, selected through purposive sampling based on their relevance to mental health awareness and public education. The analysis focuses on thematic, semantic, lexical, and rhetorical structures to reveal how mental health issues are represented and framed. The findings indicate that the captions consistently construct mental health as a shared social concern rather than an individual weakness. Through empathetic lexical choices, inclusive pronouns, and rhetorical strategies such as repetition and reflective questioning, the discourse promotes understanding, reduces stigma, and encourages collective responsibility. The study concludes that Instagram captions function not only as informational texts but also as powerful discursive tools that shape public perceptions of mental health. This research contributes to discourse studies by demonstrating the role of digital media in constructing mental health awareness and highlighting the relevance of CDA for analyzing contemporary social media discourse.


Full Text:

PDF

References


Andalibi, N., Ozturk, P., & Forte, A. (2017). Sensitive self-disclosures, responses, and social support on Instagram: The case of #depression. Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing, 1485–1500. https://doi.org/10.1145/2998181.2998243

Berry, N., Lobban, F., Belousov, M., Emsley, R., Nenadic, G., & Bucci, S. (2017). #WhyWeTweetMH: Understanding why people use Twitter to discuss mental health problems. Journal of Medical Internet Research, 19(4), e107. https://doi.org/10.2196/jmir.6173

Berryman, C., Ferguson, C. J., & Negy, C. (2018). Social media use and mental health among young adults. Psychiatric Quarterly, 89(2), 307–314. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11126-017-9535-6

Corrigan, P. W., Druss, B. G., & Perlick, D. A. (2014). The impact of mental illness stigma on seeking and participating in mental health care. Psychological Science in the Public Interest, 15(2), 37–70. https://doi.org/10.1177/1529100614531398

Flowerdew, J., & Richardson, J. E. (Eds.). (2018). The Routledge handbook of critical discourse studies (pp. 2–62). Routledge.

Hasibuan, A. S., Purnomo, M. D., & Rafida, T. (2025). The teaching of English in writing class at senior high school: A multimodal discourse analysis. TELL-US JOURNAL, 11(3), 1109-1130. http://dx.doi.org/10.22202/tus.2025.v11i3.10294

Henderson, C., & Thornicroft, G. (2009). Stigma and discrimination in mental illness: Time to change. The Lancet, 373(9679), 1928–1930. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0140-6736(09)61046-1

Hidayah, F. N., Purnomo, M. D., & Daulay, S. H. (2025). Multimodality in the English textbook images: Gender representation analysis. Getsempena English Education Journal, 12(1), 76-90. https://doi.org/10.46244/geej.v12i1.3190

McCosker, A., & Gerrard, Y. (2021). Hashtagging depression on Instagram: Towards a relational understanding of mental health and social media. Social Media + Society, 7(3), 1–12. https://doi.org/10.1177/20563051211033865

Moorhead, S. A., Hazlett, D. E., Harrison, L., Carroll, J. K., Irwin, A., & Hoving, C. (2013). A new dimension of health care: Systematic review of the uses, benefits, and limitations of social media for health communication. Journal of Medical Internet Research, 15(4), e85. https://doi.org/10.2196/jmir.1933

Moreno, M. A., Ton, A., Selkie, E., & Evans, Y. (2016). Secret society 123: Understanding the language of self-harm on Instagram. Journal of Adolescent Health, 58(1), 78–84. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jadohealth.2015.09.015

Naslund, J. A., Aschbrenner, K. A., Marsch, L. A., & Bartels, S. J. (2016). The future of mental health care: Peer-to-peer support and social media. Epidemiology and Psychiatric Sciences, 25(2), 113–122. https://doi.org/10.1017/S2045796015001067

Naslund, J. A., Bondre, A., Torous, J., & Aschbrenner, K. A. (2020). Social media and mental health: Benefits, risks, and opportunities for research and practice. Journal of Technology in Behavioral Science, 5(3), 245–257. https://doi.org/10.1007/s41347-020-00134-x

O’Reilly, M., Dogra, N., Whiteman, N., Hughes, J., Eruyar, S., & Reilly, P. (2018).mIs social media bad for mental health and wellbeing? Exploring the perspectives of adolescents. Clinical Child Psychology and Psychiatry, 23(4), 601–613. https://doi.org/10.1177/1359104518775154

Page, R., Barton, D., Lee, C., Unger, J. W., & Zappavigna, M. (2022). Researching language and social media: A student guide. Routledge.

Pretorius, C., Chambers, D., & Coyle, D. (2019). Young people’s online help-seeking and mental health difficulties: A systematic narrative review. Journal of Medical Internet Research, 21(11), e13873. https://doi.org/10.2196/13873

Purnomo, M. D., Basri, M. H., & Manik, N. (2025). Indonesian and Australian Students’ Multimodal Perceptions on Master’s English Curriculum for Global Competition: A Comparative Study. Register Journal, 18(2), 236–259. https://doi.org/10.18326/register.v18i2.236-259

Purnomo, M. D. (2016). Menakar kualitas pendidikan berkarakter di indonesia. Tazkiya: Jurnal Pendidikan Islam, 5(2).

Purnomo, M. D. (2017). The Power of Language (Kuasa Bahasa) Dalam Dimensi Sosial, Politik, Budaya dan Pendidikan.

Purnomo, M. D. (2013). Sexism language in the contemporary islamic literature perspective.

Robinson, J., Cox, G., Bailey, E., Hetrick, S., Rodrigues, M., Fisher, S., & Herrman, H. (2019). Social media and suicide prevention: A systematic review. Early Intervention in Psychiatry, 10(2), 103–121. https://doi.org/10.1111/eip.12229

Semino, E., Demjén, Z., Demmen, J., Koller, V., Payne, S., Hardie, A., & Rayson, P. (2018). The online use of violence and journey metaphors by patients with cancer, as compared with health professionals: A mixed methods study. BMJ Supportive & Palliative Care, 8(1), 60–66. https://doi.org/10.1136/bmjspcare-2014-000785

Tannen, D., Hamilton, H. E., & Schiffrin, D. (2015). The handbook of discourse analysis. John Wiley & Sons.

van Dijk, T. A. (2021). Critical Discourse Studies: A Sociocognitive Approach. In R. Wodak & M. Meyer (Eds.), Methods of Critical Discourse Studies (4th ed.). Sage.

Vraga, E. K., & Tully, M. (2021). News literacy, social media behaviors, and skepticism toward information on social media. Information, Communication & Society, 24(2), 150–166. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118X.2019.1637445

Wodak, R. (2022). Critical linguistics and critical discourse analysis. In Handbook of pragmatics (pp. 426–443). John Benjamins.

World Health Organization. (2022). World mental health report: Transforming mental health for all. World Health Organization. https://www.who.int/publications/i/item/9789240049338

Zappavigna, M. (2015). Searchable talk: The linguistic functions of hashtags. Social Semiotics, 25(3), 274–291. https://doi.org/10.1080/10350330.2014.996948

Zayts-Spence, O., Edmonds, D., & Fortune, Z. (2023). Mental health, discourse and stigma. BMC Psychology, 11(1), 180. https://doi.org/10.1186/s40359-023-01174-0




DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.30829/inspiration.v5i1.27870

Refbacks

  • There are currently no refbacks.


Bookmark and Share


Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Indexed by: