Child mental health has been an emerging topic in societal as well as scholar spheres. Mental health is intimately connected with wellbeing and as such their promotion by the World Health Organization(WHO) has allowed for governmental and societal structures to be aware of what is necessary to implement and change in order to achieve better child mental health and wellbeing. Through this thesis, the representations of children and how mental health and well-being are constructed are analysed using Bacchi’s “What’s the problem presented to be” (WPR) method. The aim of this studyis to critically examine how the concepts and representations described above are discursively generated in the annual reports of 2015 and 2016 from the WHO. When analyzing the representations of the child, mental health and wellbeing, two major themes are identified: The vulnerable/agentic child and the best place for a child. The first theme discursively represents children in three forms: Helplessness or victim, passive recipients and agentic.The second theme represents not only children but also their families, the institutions and the institutional staff. Here another three discourses emerge: Connection to the nuclear family discourse,the powerful and harming institutions discourse and the blaming the staff discourse. Regarding the concepts of wellbeing and mental health, the results comprising this thesis suggest that, in the reports,mental health is presented to be a question of who the caregiver is and how resources such as education are distributed. Wellbeing is connected to the presence of the parents with the child avoiding thus institutionalization as well as the children becoming victims of the malpractices of the negligent institutional staff and the possibility of children becoming agents in their own lives. Finally,the seemingly unproblematic aspects of such representations indicate that the arguments about the vulnerable/agentic child and the best place for a child, are not put in context and are about a generalized child that does not fit the specificity of children’s worlds.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UPSALLA1/oai:DiVA.org:liu-148540 |
| Date | January 2018 |
| Creators | Gonçalves, Laura |
| Publisher | Linköpings universitet, Tema Barn |
| Source Sets | DiVA Archive at Upsalla University |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Student thesis, info:eu-repo/semantics/bachelorThesis, text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Rights | info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess |
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