Lost in a sea of highlight reels: The use of social media and mental health metaphors in online health blogs
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.32714/ricl.13.01.03Keywords:
social media, metaphor, mental health, well-being, evaluationAbstract
This article explores the metaphorical conceptualisation of social media and its relationship with mental health and well-being in a specialised corpus of online health blogs, with the aim of discovering how people communicate their experience of social media use, and whether it has a positive or negative influence in their lives. For this purpose, a 20,000-word corpus of blog posts from online health communities, charities and personal blogs were collected and analysed. The main research questions are: a) How is social media conceptualised? b) Are metaphors used to conceptualise social media evaluative? c) How are mental health and well-being conceptualised? d) How are metaphors used to discuss the benefits and challenges of social media use for individuals who suffer from illness? Results show that the DRUGS, PLACE, PATH and FOOD source domains are used to conceptualise social media, and that metaphor is used to highlight both the positive impact of social media in providing social support and its negative impact on symptoms when used excessively.
Downloads
References
Brusilovskiy, Eugene, Greg Townley, Gretchen Snethen and Mark S. Salzer. 2016. Social media use, community participation and psychological well-being among individuals with serious mental illnesses. Computers in Human Behaviour 65: 232–240.
Charteris-Black, Johnathan. 2012. Shattering the bell jar: Metaphor, gender, and depression. Metaphor and Symbol 27/3: 199–216.
Coll-Florit, Marta and Salvador Climent. 2022. Enemies or obstacles? Metaphors of war and journey in mental health discourse. Metaphor and the Social World 12/2: 181–203.
Coll-Florit, Marta, Antoni Oliver and Salvador Climent. 2021. Metaphors of mental illness: A corpus-based approach analysing first-person accounts of patients and mental health professionals. Cultura, Lenguaje y Representación 25: 85–104.
Deignan, Alice. 2010. The evaluative properties of metaphors. In Graham Low, Zazie Todd, Alice Deignan and Lynne Cameron eds. Researching and Applying Metaphor in the Real World. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 357–374.
Démjen, Zsófia and Elena Semino. 2017. Introduction: Metaphor and language. In Elena Semino and Zsófia Demjén eds. The Routledge Handbook of Metaphor and Language. New York: Routledge, 1–10.
Forceville, Charles and Sissy Paling. 2021. The metaphorical representation of depression in short, wordless animation films. Visual Communication 20/1: 100–120.
El Refaie, Elisabeth. 2014. Looking on the dark and bright side: Creative metaphors of depression in two graphic memoirs. Auto/Biography Studies 29/1: 149–174.
Foley, Jennifer and Laura Hidalgo-Downing. 2024. Instagram is a ridiculous lie factory: Creative and evaluative metaphors of social media in a sample of newspaper opinion discourse. Metaphor and the Social World 14/1: 85–108.
Fuoli, Mateo, Jeannette Littlemore and Sarah Turner. 2022. Sunken ships and screaming banshees: Metaphor and evaluation in film reviews. English Language and Linguistics 26/1: 75–103.
Girón-García, Carolina and Montserrat Esbrí-Blasco. 2019. Analysing the digital world and its metaphoricity: Cybergenres and cybermetaphors in the 21st Century. Cultura, Lenguaje y Representación 22: 21–35.
Goatly, Andrew. 1997. The Language of Metaphors. London: Routledge.
Hidalgo-Downing, Laura and Paula Pérez-Sobrino. 2023. “Pushing Britain off the precipice”: A CDA approach to negative evaluative stance in opinion articles on Brexit. In Juana I. Marín-Arrese, Laura Hidalgo-Downing and Juan Rafael Zamorano-Mansilla eds. Stance, Inter/Subjectivity and Identity in Discourse. Bern: Peter Lang, 201–226.
Hidalgo-Downing, Laura and Paula Pérez-Sobrino. 2024. Developing an annotation protocol for evaluative stance and metaphor in discourse. Text and Talk 44/2: 197–221.
Hidalgo-Downing, Laura, Paula Pérez-Sobrino, Laura Filardo-Llamas, Carmen Maíz-Arevalo, Begoña Núñez-Perucha, Alfonso Sánchez-Moya and Julia Williams Camus. 2024. A protocol for the annotation of evaluative stance and metaphor across four discourse genres. Revista Española de Lingüística Aplicada 37/2: 486–517.
Hu, Yifeng. 2019. Helping is healing: Examining relationships between social support, intended audiences, and perceived benefits of mental health blogging. Journal of Communication in Healthcare 12/2: 112–120.
Isomursu, Pekka, Rachel Hinman, Minna Isomursu and Mirjana Spasojevic. 2007. Metaphors for the mobile internet. Knowledge, Technology & Policy 20/4: 259–268.
Katzenbach, Christian and Stefan Larsson. 2017. Imagining the Digital Society – Metaphors from the Past and Present. https://www.hiig.de/en/imagining-the-digital-society-metaphors-from-the-past-and-present/
Keles, Betul, Niall McCrae and Annmarie Grealish. 2020. A systematic review: The influence of social media on depression, anxiety and psychological distress in adolescents. International Journal of Adolescence and Youth 25/1: 79–93.
Kross, Ethan, Philippe Verduyn, Gal Sheppes, Cory K. Costello, John Jonides and Oscar Ybarra. 2021. Social media and well-being: Pitfalls, progress, and next steps. Trends in Cognitive Sciences 25/1: 55–66.
Lakoff, George and Mark Johnson. 1980. Metaphors We Live by. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Lakoff, George, Jane Espenson and Alan Schwartz. 1991. The Master Metaphor List. Berkely: University of California.
Le Roux, Daniel B. and Douglas A. Parry. 2020. The Town square in your pocket: Exploring four metaphors of social media. In Marié Hattingh, Machdel Matthee, Hanlie Smuts, Ilias Pappas, Yogesh K. Dwivedi, Yogesh K Dwivedi and Matti Mäntymäki eds. Responsible Design, Implementation and Use of Information and Communication Technology. New York: Springer, 187–198.
Littlemore, Jeannette and Sarah Turner. 2019. What can metaphor tell us about experiences of pregnancy loss and how are these experiences reflected in midwife practice? Frontiers in Communication 4. https://doi.org/10.3389/fcomm.2019.00042
Martin, John and Peter R. R. White. 2005. The Language of Evaluation. London: Palgrave Macmillan.
Meier, Adrian and Leonard Reinecke. 2020. Computer-mediated communication, social media, and mental health: A conceptual and empirical meta-review. Communication Research 48/8: 1182–1209.
Miller, Daniel, Laila Abed Rabho, Patrick Awondo, Maya de Vries, Marília Duque, Pauline Garvey, Laura Haapio-Kirk, Charlotte Hawkins, Alfonso Otaegui, Shireen Walton and Xinyuan Wang. 2021. The Global Smartphone: Beyond a Youth Technology. Ageing with Smartphones. London: University College London Press.
Miller, Edward Alan and Antoinette Pole. 2010. Diagnosis blog: Checking up on health blogs in the blogosphere. American Journal of Public Health 100/8: 1514–1519.
Naslund, John. A., Ameya Bondre, John Torous and Kelly A. Aschbrenner. 2020. Social media and mental health: Benefits, risks, and opportunities for research and practice. Journal of Technology in Behavioural Science 5: 245–257.
Naslund, John A., Stuart W. Grande, Kelly A. Aschbrenner and Glyn Elwyn. 2014. Naturally occurring peer support through social media: The experiences of individuals with severe mental illness using YouTube. PLoS ONE 9/10: e110171. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0110171
Porto, Dolores M. 2022. Water metaphors and evaluation of Syrian migration: The flow of refugees in the Spanish press. Metaphor and Symbol 37/3: 252–267.
Pragglejaz Group. 2007. MIP: A method for identifying metaphorically used words in discourse. Metaphor and Symbol 22/1: 1–39.
Semino, Elena. 2008. Metaphor in Discourse. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Semino, Elena. 2021. “Not soldiers but firefighters” – Metaphors and covid-19. Health Communication 36/1: 50–58.
Semino, Elena, Zsófia Demjén, Andrew Hardie, Sheila Payne and Paula Rayson. 2018. Metaphor, Cancer and the End of Life: A Corpus-based Study. London: Routledge.
Steen, Gerard. J., Aletta G. Dorst, J. Berenike Herrmann, Anna A. Kaal, Tina Krennmayr and Tryntje Pasma. 2010. A Method for Linguistic Metaphor Identification. From MIP to MIPVU. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Tay, Dennis. 2017. Using metaphor in mental healthcare. In Elena Semino and Zsófia Demjén eds. The Routledge Handbook of Metaphor and Language. New York: Routledge, 371–385.
Published
How to Cite
Issue
Section
License
Copyright (c) 2025 Research in Corpus Linguistics
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Submission of your paper to this journal implies that the paper is not under submission for publication elsewhere. Material which has been previously copyrighted, published, or accepted for publication will not be considered for publication in this journal. Submission of a manuscript is interpreted as a statement of certification that no part of the manuscript is copyrighted by any other publisher nor is under review by any other formal publication. By submitting your manuscript to us, you agree on these copyright guidelines. It is your responsibility to ensure that your manuscript does not cause any copyright infringements, defamation, and other problems.
Submitted papers are assumed to contain no proprietary material unprotected by patent or patent application; responsibility for technical content and for protection of proprietary material rests solely with the author(s) and their organizations and is not the responsibility of the journal or its editorial staff. The main author is responsible for ensuring that the article has been seen and approved by all the other authors. It is the responsibility of the author to obtain all necessary copyright release permissions for the use of any copyrighted materials in the manuscript prior to the submission.
Authors retain copyright and grant the journal right of first publication with the work simultaneously licensed under the BY Creative Commons Attribution License that allows others to share the work with an acknowledgement of the work's authorship and initial publication in this journal
Article submission implies author agreement with this policy.
