Conceptual Representation of Mental Health in China’s International News Media: A Corpus-Based Cognitive Discourse Analysis

Research on mental health news discourse has increasingly expanded, yet its cognitive dimension remains underexplored, particularly regarding how linguistic choices construct conceptual frames and shape public perception. To address this gap, this study examines the conceptual representation of mental health issues in China’s state-aligned international news media from emotional and cognitive-semantic dimensions, alongside its perception-shaping and ideological functions. Employing a corpus-based cognitive discourse analysis, it analyzes English-language mental health news published in China Daily between 2020 and 2023. The findings show that mental health issues are discursively constructed as conceptually multifaceted through multiple linguistically anchored frames. Specifically, referential expressions primarily profile the positive Health frame as well as fewer negative frames, indicating a positive discursive shift and the conceptual complexity of mental health issues. Predicative adjectives foreground the Importance frame, emphasizing the significance of mental health. The governability of mental health issues is further construed through noun phrases that evoke the Problem and Resource frames and through verb-predicate structures that activate the Intentionally_act and change-related frames. Together, these patterns frame mental health issues as manageable challenges through a governance logic that situated individual self-agency within broader social and state-led initiatives, while reflecting China’s proactive and committed stance toward addressing mental health issues. This study contributes to current understanding of the conceptual representation of mental health in China’s international news coverage and advances the cognitive discourse analysis of mental health news. Future research may extend this line of inquiry through diachronic framing and cross-domain comparisons in health-related discourse.