Abstract
Popular and professional media play a significant role in shaping the social construction of prescription medication. However, different national contexts create significant variation in these constructions – even when comparing a similar medication. To explore this, our research investigates the social construction of a prescribed antidepressant-Venlafaxine in British and Chinese newspapers and scientific journals and examines how the understanding of medication is significantly determined by how it is represented. Our work will be based on: • British news corpus (669,340 words-articles in UK national newspapers covered by Nexis) and medical corpus (443,297 words-articles in UK medical journals covered by the Medline).