A crisis within the crisis

representations of children’s mental health in the UK press before and during the Covid-19 pandemic

Abstract

This essay investigates the representation of children’s mental health in the UK press in the period immediately prior to the onset of and during the first 16 months of the Covid-19 pandemic, up to June 2021, during which, after the first wave of infections, a hard lockdown and a partial reopening, a resurgence of the virus after the summer months required the reintroduction of distancing measures, amid growing concerns for children and their mental health as a result of prolonged isolation. Based on a collection of articles from the British quality and tabloid press, the study takes a corpus-driven approach combined with discourse analysis, and identifies salient lexical features which not only provide an outline of the dominant concerns in children’s mental health discourse, but also of the way it was framed across the period considered. Prior to the pandemic, the ‘crisis’ frame dominated. The discourse of children’s mental health was characterised by alarm, urgency and a call for immediate action. In the first part of the pandemic, the crisis frame was hijacked by the pandemic itself. The dominant frame for the topic of children’s mental health was that of risk, which projected the concerns into an uncertain future. In the last period considered, the ‘risk’ frame was replaced by an ‘impact’ frame, which was characterised by greater control and less uncertainty. The findings suggest that, while the salience of children’s mental health in the press continued to be high, the frame shifts blunted the agenda-setting momentum which characterised the pre-pandemic period.