Abstract
Depression is one of the most widespread mental health issues around the world, and the consumption of antidepressant drugs have risen steadily in recent decades in Britain and China. What British and Chinese read about antidepressants in popular media and scientific discourse will contribute/constrain their ability to evaluate the risks and benefits of antidepressants. This research investigates the social constructions of escitalopram, a commonly prescribed antidepressant in British and Chinese newspapers and medical journals. Four corpora were built for this research project: British news corpus (265,644 words) includes articles in UK national newspapers covered by Nexis and medical corpus (545,969 words) comprises articles in UK medical journals covered by the Medline. Chinese news corpus (13,371 words) includes articles in key news websites and medical corpus (343,266 words) comprises articles in medical journals extracted from China National Knowledge Infrastructure). Frequency, collocation, keyword and paraphrase analyses were used to identify pattens of meanings. Initial findings suggest that in both British and Chinese news contexts, comparisons between the effects of escitalopram and psilocybin (psychedelic mushroom) on depression are overwhelmingly talked about and psilocybin is represented as superior to normal types of Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitors (SSRIs). Furthermore, both British and Chinese news construct the most important side-effect of escitalopram as sex dysfunction. Other side-effects that Chinese news represent frequently include deteriorating liver function and nausea while British news discuss more about withdrawal symptoms. In British medical journals, explanations to mechanism of actions of escitalopram prevail, which contributes to prove the effectiveness of this medication while Chinese medical journals predominantly construct escitalopram as a helpful antidepressant to cope with old people's depression. Acknowledgement: This research is funded by British Academy/Leverhulme Small Research Grants (reference: SG2122\210988).