Mental health discourse analysts have recently paid more to social media which can produce and disseminate more diverse knowledge and voices about mental health compared to the traditional, authoritative sources of information on this subject. This ongoing study examines some multimodal, multilingual social media posts about mental well-being that are produced and propagated by two mental health organizations in Hong Kong. It employs critical multimodal discourse analysis to examine how these posts discursively promote particular knowledge and beliefs about mental well-being through strategic representations of social actors, social activities and affect with various textual and visual resources. The analysis shows that many of the posts tend to discursively individualize affect and mental well-being by heavily relying on examples of individual persons and intensively personalizing engagement with the readers/viewers. Furthermore, many posts consistently link mental well-being to personal success, progress or achievement with a range of discursive resources such as specific mottos and metaphors of 'positivity' and public celebrities' quotes and condensed personal stories. I therefore argue the examined social media discourses subtly tie the promoted mental health awareness and knowledge to the neoliberal ideology of individual (self-)entrepreneurialism. In addition, the Chinese-language posts predominantly emphasize positivity whereas those in English tend to normalize affective swings more often, manifesting different ideologies about mental well-being. The study contributes to the field of mental health discourse research by drawing more attention to well-being (than illness) and non-English speaking contexts.
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