EUFEMISME DALAM PEMBERITAAN KESEHATAN MENTAL DI SITUS WEB BBC INDONESIA: ANALISIS SOSIOSEMANTIK
Abstract
Mental health has become a major global concern over the past decade, particularly following the COVID-19 pandemic, which revealed widespread psychological impacts on society. The media play a strategic role in shaping public understanding of mental health issues, especially through linguistic choices in news reporting. One prominent linguistic strategy in reporting sensitive issues is the use of euphemism. This study aims to identify the forms, functions, and meanings of euphemisms in mental health news published on the BBC Indonesia website and to examine how social context influences their use. Employing a qualitative approach, this research applies a sociosemantic analysis grounded in Halliday’s Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL), focusing on the dimensions of field, tenor, and mode. The data consist of ten mental health–related news articles published by BBC Indonesia during the 2024–2025 period, analyzed using Allan and Burridge’s theory of euphemism. The findings reveal twenty instances of euphemism, encompassing various forms such as lexical substitution, periphrasis, metaphor, and medical terminology. These euphemisms function to reduce stigma, maintain journalistic ethics, normalize psychological experiences, and protect readers from excessive emotional impact. Sociosemantic analysis indicates that euphemism use is closely related to situational context: the field of mental health requires sensitive language, the tenor between journalists and readers is constructed as empathetic and professional, and the mode of discourse is predominantly informative and narrative. This study concludes that euphemism in BBC Indonesia’s mental health reporting constitutes a deliberate and systematic discursive practice that plays a crucial role in framing mental health issues in an ethical, inclusive, and stigma-free manner.
Keywords: euphemism; mental health; BBC Indonesia; sociosemantic analysis.
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