Culture in Australian Mental Health Podcasts

Abstract

In recent years, mental health and mental health services have become a topic of increasing interest not only for governments and policymakers, but also for researchers. In the wake of COVID-19, online discourses of mental health in particular have garnered interest as a topic of research. According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, over a fifth of Australians experienced a mental health disorder in 2020-2022, but less than half of those individuals saw a mental health professional (Australian Bureau of Statistics, 2020). Research on online mental health discourses is therefore critical to our understanding of how people are experiencing mental health and seeking non-professional support for mental health issues. Much of the current research which has been performed has been carried out on written discussion fora (such as r/Depression, (Low et al., 2020 & Sik et al., 2023) or organisationally-sponsored blogs (Jamet & Coupe , 2023)). Spoken data, such as podcasts, have generally not been studied. Although it is accepted in linguistics that culture is a critical component of how meaning and ideas about emotion are constructed through language (Wierzbicka, 1999; Ye, 2022a), very little of the current research has considered the question of how culture, through language, might shape the discourses being studied. The few studies which have considered culture have lacked an appropriate framework through which to examine these culturally specific influences. This study begins to address that lack, examining how embedded cultural meanings are produced and used in podcast mental health discourses in Anglo-Australian linguaculture and, in turn, how culture informs our conceptualisation of mental health. It does so through an appropriately culturally-focussed framework, Semantically-enhanced Discourse Studies (Bromhead, 2024; Ye, 2022a). This approach offers a uniquely ethnopragmatic lens, combining a focus on culture in communication with the deep analytical power and emphasis on rendering embedded concepts transparent of the Natural Semantic Metalanguage approach (Goddard, 2018). A corpus of c. 23 hours of spoken data has been collected from popular podcasts representative of contemporary, non-expert Australian discourses and analysed in order to answer the aim of the study. From this corpus, three cultural keywords have been identified for analysis: struggle with, stressed, and validation. Each of these keywords has been carefully explicated, and the proposed explications tested against each instance of the keyword in the corpus. Through these explications, not only the cultural attunement of each keyword, but also how culture shapes conceptualisations in the broader discourse space are revealed through the culturally-attuned, embedded meanings within each keyword. It is found that culture shapes how mental health is conceptualised in lay discourses. Several key cultural scripts in the discourse are identified, and it is found that these scripts combine to form a model for ‘what to do’, accessible to participants in online, lay discourses of mental health. This suggests that in order to understand experiences of mental health, it must first be understood how culture constructs ideas about mental health in discourse.