“They can’t cope”: Youth Self-injury and Risk Discourse in Canadian News Media
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Epidemics of self-injury are increasingly framed as public health crises and risk facing youth in Canada. This article examines the discursive construction of youth self-injury as risk in mainstream Canadian news articles through a neoliberal governmentality framework. It argues that self-injury risk discourses are consistent with neoliberal mental health paradigms, which individualize and depoliticize distress while responsibilizing individuals for recovery and wellbeing. The construction of youth self-injury in terms of risk simultaneously undergirds the surveillance, regulation, and coercive control of self-injuring subjects. Based on a critical discourse analysis of Canadian news articles addressing the problem of youth self-injury, this article identifies and discusses three interrelated themes from study findings: social (media) contagion, failed resilience, and system overwhelm. Ultimately, it suggests that the construction of self-injury in terms of risk frames self-injuring youth as failed neoliberal subjects. Risk discourses are therefore incompatible with social justice paradigms in mental health.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.006 | 0.021 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.007 | 0.007 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.027 | 0.020 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.021 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".