Communicating mental health online: a comparative multimodal analysis of the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health and Children’s Mental Health Ontario

Abstract

Online mental health communication is a niche area of study in the professional communication field that has been studied previously by several researchers who have applied a social semiotics and critical discourse analysis approach. Since mental health has become a critical public health issue worldwide, this major research paper (MRP) presents a comparative analysis of two mental health organizations’ websites, the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health and the Children’s Mental Health Ontario. This paper explores how both organizations communicate mental health online. To address the proposed questions of this research study, a multimodal analysis of text and images is conducted for each organization’s website. The data collected from this study identifies key themes that uncover how mental health is communicated on both organization’s websites. A visual social semiotic analysis is applied to contribute to the understanding of the shifting mental health model and the positive psychology approach to mental health. Furthermore, this research study combines linguistic tools to study the meanings of text and images at a micro-semiotic level in order to analyze the social power used within the texts of both websites.