Abstract
AbstractMedia coverage of dementia can influence public and professional attitudes towards the syndrome, shaping societal knowledge of dementia and impacting how people with dementia are cared for. This paper reports on a study of news articles about dementia published in the British press in the years 2012–2017. The analysis combines the tools of corpus linguistics, a methodology for quantitatively surveying a vast amount of electronic linguistic data, with the qualitative perspectives of Critical Discourse Analysis, which seeks to uncover dominant discourses and ideologies. The most salient discourse that emerged from this analysis was the portrayal of dementia in biomedical terms, with a particular focus on the pathological processes of dementia, and pharmaceutical treatments and research. Keywords relating to this discourse are interrogated in detail, illuminating the linguistic strategies through which the pathology of dementia and people with dementia are depicted. This study highlights the challenges that this type of reporting presents to people living with dementia and their families, and points to the relevance of a discursive approach to understanding societal perceptions of dementia.
Highlights
In the United Kingdom (UK), dementia is the leading cause of death for those aged 80 and over (Office for National Statistics, 2017), and the number of people diagnosed with dementia is increasing, predicted to reach two million people by 2051 (Alzheimer’s Society, 2014)
The methodological combination of corpus linguistics and Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) allowed for the quantitative identification of the most salient linguistic features in the data, followed by a qualitative consideration of how these features contributed to the dominant discourses surrounding dementia
In a corpus of five years of news reporting of dementia in the British national press, dementia was framed predominantly through a discourse of biomedicine. The prevalence of this discourse was evidenced in the number of keywords relating to disease pathology, medical interventions and clinical research, which the quantitative corpus analysis showed to be significantly more salient in the corpus than in general British English
Summary
In the United Kingdom (UK), dementia is the leading cause of death for those aged 80 and over (Office for National Statistics, 2017), and the number of people diagnosed with dementia is increasing, predicted to reach two million people by 2051 (Alzheimer’s Society, 2014). With no straightforward way to treat dementia, limited scientific understanding of the exact causes and processes, and currently no cure (Dening and Babu Sandilyan, 2015), dementia has come to invoke intense cultural anxieties about ageing, disability and death (Lock, 2013). A key site within which cultural perceptions of dementia are reproduced and legitimated is the news media (Basting, 2009). The news media is a vital source of information on health and wellbeing for the lay public (Lupton, 1999; Gwyn, 2001; Ramon, 2007)
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