The Media Representation of Mental Health Awareness to Support Therapy and Recovery for Health Workers: : A Discourse Analysis to Break Mental Health Stigma

Abstract: The mental health (MH) of health workers during the 2019 pandemic has been severely affected by the disruptive coping and heavy workload management of the Covid crisis. Critical emergency contexts trigger many MH issues and disorders in many health workers who do not have adequate tools and strategies to respond to MH threats when traditional medical methods cannot be provided. Given the successful recovery outcomes obtained against physical illness disorders through physical illness representations, this project was carried out to search for effective discursive strategies within visual representations applied to MH issues. Exploring improved MH representation techniques could lead to finding strategies for informing about the stigma and triggering self-therapy, self-recovery and self-regulation coping mechanisms in health workers against MH threats. This study used discourse analysis to explore four representative YouTube videos portraying health workers and MH issues. The findings show that visual representations, including audiovisual and prosodic elements, rhetoric and storytelling techniques, impact people's psychological and behavioural processes. Once medically tested, these resources could support health professionals and institutions as an extension of the existing scientific methods, treatment and tools dealing with MH issues. E-mental health and digital technologies, which use media representation, could represent the first step to trigger a much more extensive study and scientific debate on the complementary strategy of media representation for MH acknowledgement, therapy and recovery. Nevertheless, additional and more quantitative interlinked medical and media studies on MH issues and representation have to be carried out. Therefore, the need to investigate highlights the need for interdisciplinary collaboration between media and communication, traditional medical therapy research and the participation of all the actors involved.