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Description
The article aims at exploring the impact of the COVID pandemic on the lay discourses of depression emerging in online mental health forums. The narrative framing of depression plays a central role not only because it affects the instrumental strategies of the depressed subjects (e.g. preferred therapy), but also because it is a constitutive element of the identity of depressed subjects, thus affects the process of recovery itself. COVID had a serious impact on people living with mental disorders (especially depression and anxiety), thus our research aimed at mapping the consequences of these transformations on discursive level. A textual dataset of the most popular, English language online health forums was collected (n=339,550 publicly available entries posted between 15 February 2016 and 31 December 2020). Structural topic modelling was used to explore the various discursive patterns characterising the pre-and post-COVID era. Our results show that the pandemic did not take over the discursive space of depression forums, yet it transformed many aspects of it: a new horizon of critique opened up; the biomedical authority was reinforced; the ego-centric perspectives were refined; the previously unquestionable discursive frames become fragmented; and the horizon of emergency overshadowed the previous risk perspective.
