Chapter 8 explores the ways in which the press talk about people having mental illness using a mixed-methods approach. In the chapter, the frequency and semantic and pragmatic content of the verbs ‘suffer’ and ‘ experience’ in the context of prescribed forms for talking about having mental illness are investigated. I show that ‘suffer’ and ‘experience’ occur in different semantic contexts in the MI 1984–2014 Corpus as well as general language corpora, which may contribute to ‘suffer’ being a more problematic term for describing mental health than ‘experience’. Moreover, I show that ‘suffer’ is proportionally less likely to be used in first-person narratives because ‘suffering’ is attributed to people with mental illness by others, for example, medical professionals, in reported speech. I bring together my findings in a set of lexicogrammatical heuristics based on the semantic content of ‘suffer’ and ‘experience’ in context (e.g. whether the word encodes animacy or is temporally bounded).

Chapter 4 provides an overview of Analytical Methods in Critical Discourse Analysis, covering the early manifestations of linguistic inquiry into ideology in texts such as that of the East Anglia School (Fowler et al., 1979) to contemporary research into corpus-assisted discourse analysis that combines these early principles of CDA with computational methods. The notion that the automation of textual analysis offered by corpus linguistics provides a magic bullet for objectivity in CDA is discussed and contested. The different CDA methods used in the book are outlined. Specifically, Halliday’s transitivity model, taken from his model of Systemic Functional Linguistics (2003 [1973]), and naming analysis are discusssed and exemplified using relevant data.