Mental health advocacy on Twitter: Positioning in Depression Awareness Week tweets

Abstract

empowerment', 'starting a movement' and 'countering stigma'. She takes as a case study Karolyn Gehrig's #HospitalGlam selfies and shows how posting such selfies on social media enables individuals to 'come out' as invisibly ill. Jones (2015) highlights the potential of online storytelling for social activism through the analysis of 'It Gets Better' videos-a successful campaign for 'at risk' LGBT adolescents that led to the creation and circulation of over 50,000 YouTube videos. Driven by temporary online collaborations among individuals and 'personalised engagement' with protest waves (e.g. the #metoo movement) such digitally mediated activist practices are best described within the framework of 'connective action' (Bennet & Segerberg, 2013), which complements rather than replaces collective action (Meikle, 2018). Conceptual framework: Illness narratives as networked stories Research on the forms and functions of illness narratives expanded rapidly during the last decades of the twentieth century (Bury, 2001; Charmaz, 2002), driven in part by the need to recognise lay experiences and individual suffering in everyday contexts. Social media campaigns that invite people to tell stories of their personal experiences via micro-blogging platforms capitalise on the potential of stories to bring the listeners into the private world of the storyteller and reveal subjective experiences. Provision of detailed, mundane and personal content via

Ethical approval: none sought. How discourse analysts report ethical issues around publicly available online data

“…However, seeking informed consent was generally regarded as inevitable for analysis of images, particularly selfies (e.g. Koteyko and Atanasova, 2018; Matley, 2018; Veum and Undrum, 2018).…”

Mental health and the media: From illness to wellbeing

“…The rise of social media with low barriers to entry (everyone can, in principle, start a blog or a Twitter account) allows “ordinary” people with mental health difficulties to produce content and make their voices heard while bypassing mainstream media (Newman, Dutton, & Blank, ). Social media (particularly Twitter) offers opportunities for grass‐roots mental health advocacy (e.g., Koteyko & Atanasova, ), and blogs written by individuals experiencing mental health problems are regarded as important sources of information and sites of self‐(re)presentation (e.g., Campbell, ). While researchers have started to analyse mental health and social media, the focus has been on assessing social media's utility for detecting and diagnosing mental health disorders and for providing support (see Section ).…”

Storifying routines and routinising stories: A dualistic subject positioning analysis of controversies about constraints on patient autonomy

“…In a therapeutic context, numerous authors have examined how practitioners and patients position themselves in psychiatric interventions and consultations (Leishman, 2004; Mitchell, 2009; Ziolkowska, 2009), while Avdi (2012) used it as an analytical tool for examining therapy session transcripts in terms of dialogical processes. It has also been exploited to study autobiographical illness narratives, showing how a narrator's self can be positioned via archetypal ‘quest stories’ (Frank, 1995) or how Twitter accounts of depression position tellers and audiences in conformity with the narrative genres of testimony and confession (Koteyko & Atanasova, 2018). As recent mental health care reforms have turned their back on paternalistic care models in favour of community‐ or consumer‐based approaches, positioning theory has been applied to test the extent to which normative expectations about, for instance, shared decision‐making are reflected in discursive practice (Raitakari, Saario, Juhila, & Günther, 2015) or whether partnership models of care construct users willing to engage with services (Chase, Zinken, Costall, Watts, & Priebe, 2010).…”