立教大学

Mental health literacy is comparatively low in Southeastern Asia, and it is likely to be highly stigmatised. In this study, we consider how “Mental health” is linguistically constructed in terms of collocates by both the news media and lay people in Malaysia, with the aim of gaining a deeper understanding of mental health in Malaysian ideologies. Specifically, we intend to determine the characteristics, qualities, and features that are attributed to mental health in the two different domains (news articles vs. public forums). To achieve the aims of the study, two different corpora will be built: newspapers from the New Straits Times (NST) and posts about Mental health sourced from Lowyat.net and Reddit Malaysia, both of which are popular Malaysia’s online forums. We use Sketch Engine to identify the content words associated with the term “Mental health”. We begin our analysis by analysing the wordlist of lemmas for each word category (Nouns, Verbs, Adjectives and Adverbs). We then concentrated on the top ten most frequent words for each word category. To further explore the usage and patterns of these most frequent words in the corpora, we utilised the Word Sketch tool. It helps generate the top co-occurring words (collocates) in different syntactic positions. The study reveals that both the news media and public forums tend to construct a discourse of exclusivity, particularly through the verb category, by defining individuals with mental health issues in terms of their limitations in Malaysia. Considering the taboo of mental health problems and the fear of disclosure among Asians, we argue that the use of quantification and human actors (e.g., many + people) in the noun category could construct a sense of inclusivity. It is hoped that this study promotes the use of language in communicating about mental health in ways that are respectful, sensitive, and empowering, and serves as an awareness-raising effort for individuals and families who use mental health services.