Variations on a familiar theme: Reflections on advocacy journalism and the neoliberalization of mental health activism in 21st-century Canada

Abstract

In this paper, using the techniques of critical discourse analysis, metaphor analysis, and narrative analysis, I examine the perlocutionary and evidentiary properties of three articles published between March and November of 2007—two from the self-identified socially progressive newspaper the Toronto Star, and one from the Torontonian alternative newsmagazine NOW. Each of these articles describes the participation of mental health advocates in public and corporate policymaking, and all laud the promotion of bureaucratic literacy amongst psychiatric survivors and the commodification of mental health as an avenue to achieving policy reform. Ultimately, I argue that what is new about the rhetorical strategies deployed by these mental health advocates is not their invocation of market logic to justify the expansion of healthcare initiatives or pharmaceutical research, but an emerging consensus, shared by activists and policymakers alike, that unhappiness is a community concern only when it is an economic concern. In so doing, these activists contribute to the medicalization of industrial productivity, and undermine etiologies of mental illness that focus on the structural violence of capitalism, rather than endogenous pathology, as a primary determinant of psychological distress.