Different gazes and hands: Visual representations of causes and solutions of adolescent depression on Chinese state media social platforms

This paper conducts a multimodal critical discourse analysis of 92 accompanying images in 22 articles related to adolescent depression published on the WeChat official accounts of major Chinese state-aligned media outlets, including People’s Daily, CCTV.com, China News Service, and Health News. We pay special attention to analyze the multimodal discursive strategies employed to represent the causes and solutions of adolescent depression, as well as the implicit health ideologies embedded within these representations. Findings indicate that different gazes and hands are discursively represented as causes and solutions for adolescent depression. Specifically, a blaming gaze and judgmental hands visually construct the perceived origins of depression, while a mothering gaze and caring hands are deployed to depict pathways to recovery. In particular, the state media predominantly attribute the causes of depression to familial and socio-cultural factors—such as academic pressure and “face” culture—through discursive strategies including cool color palettes, spatial marginalization of adolescents, and metaphorical constructs like dominant parental figures, surveilling eyes, and encircling social judgments. In contrast, solutions are frequently visualized through warm tones, intimate compositions, and metaphors such as “healing hugs from mothers,” emphasizing familial emotional support while underrepresenting professional medical intervention. We argue that these discourses may reinforce familial-centric ideologies and conventional gender norms of mothers. Implications for more sensitive and constructive media discourses on adolescent depression in the Chinese context are discussed.