“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 distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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 teacher head, 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".