Applying the Visual-Verbal Video Analysis Framework to Understand How Mental Illness is Represented in the TV Show Euphoria

Abstract

Mental illness in media can shape viewer’s beliefs about mental health, help-seeking, and empathic behaviors. The current study sought to investigate how mental health and substance use is depicted in popular media targeted for youth. The visual-verbal video analysis (VVVA) framework was applied to the HBO American drama television series Euphoria to understand how mental illness, substance use, and mental health service use is portrayed, and how characters respond to mental health scenes. Euphoria follows a group of high school students as they navigate adolescence, mental illness and substance use. The VVVA provides a framework for social science and medical researchers to qualitatively analyze multimodal information (e.g., text, cinematography, music and sounds, body language and facial expressions) of visual content. This commentary will briefly describe the VVVA framework, provide an overview of how the framework was applied and adapted to analyze a scene in the television series Euphoria, note similarities and differences to the original VVVA framework, and benefits and drawbacks. The VVVA framework was flexible and effective in coding various elements (e.g., body language, camera angles) in a scene in Euphoria.