ABSTRACT
Chapter 2 reviews how Chinese societies have viewed and responded to severe mental illness in the past and in present times. This provides background on how Chinese-language newspapers across greater China currently report on the illness and why they do so in the ways that they do. The chapter describes the three newspapers whose reports the book analyses, and justifies their selection. It identifies the overarching themes of these reports and compares, and offers explanations for, their numerical variation across newspapers. It further identifies the need for a more nuanced, discourse analytic examination of the reports, which Chapters 3 to 5 undertake. Each chapter focuses on reports belonging to the thematic categories that Chapter 2 identifies.
