At What Cost? Framing Mental Illness in Digital News Media Coverage of Medical Assistance in Dying (MAiD)

How journalists frame, discuss and report on social issues not only shapes the content of those discussions, but has real world implications. The way media stories are narrated delimits which social issues are worthy of public discussion and the possibilities for their debate. For instance, when lives are measured in light of dominant economic discourses, such as cost-benefit analyses, the vulnerabilities that come with illness, disability and aging get framed as deficiencies, costs or burdens. However, when quality of life is measured and described holistically, indicators such as social belonging place value on our interdependence throughout the life course.

This project investigates media coverage of medical assistance in dying (MAiD) legislation in Canada, specifically the expansion of eligibility criteria to include mental illness. Recent research and theorizing building on the knowledge of people with lived experience of mental illness and their family members asserts that assisted dying should be conceived of as a form of suicide, albeit an assisted one (Baril 2020; Bastidas-Bilbao et al. 2023). As such, this research considers news coverage of MAiD’s expansion in light of the World Health Organization’s (2023) guidelines (external link, opens in new window)  for responsible reporting on suicide. Consideration is given to the potential risks and impacts of foregrounding media accounts of MAiD as a form of suicide reporting and the ways in which people diagnosed with mental illness are discursively framed in news media accounts. With an annual growth rate of over 30% (external link, opens in new window) , and impending expansion to the legislation, there is urgent need to study how MAiD is being reported on.

We are conducting a study of digital news media coverage of the impending expansion of MAiD to include the sole eligibility criteria of mental illness in 2027 (external link, opens in new window) . Critical discourse analysis (Fairclough 2012; Van Dijk 2015) will be used to explicate framings of people diagnosed with mental illnesses within these accounts. Research questions include:

1. How have news media covered the impending expansion of medical assistance in dying (MAiD) legislation in Canada to include mental illness
2. How have these accounts discursively framed and accounted for the lives of people diagnosed with mental illness and what is absent from these accounts?

Engaging the concept of social suffering (Bourdieu & Arccardo 1999; Kleinman, Das & Lock 1997; Marques 2018; Soldatic & St.Guillaume 2022), this study aims to uncover the “legibility of suffering” (Michael 2022) that boundaries representations of MAiD for mental illness in news coverage and delimits how this social issue gets publicly presented, debated and taken up. In doing so, the social risks of current reporting on MAiD, specifically for populations at the margins and at higher risk of suicide, are considered. Focusing on digital news media stories beginning from the introduction of Bill C-7 (2020 to 2024), data will be drawn from Factiva and include reports in local and national newspapers.