The “Snapping Point”: Mental Health as a Credibility Technology in Portuguese News on Sexual Violence (2014–2023)

Abstract

This article examines how mental health discourse functions as a credibility technology in Portuguese news reporting on sexual violence between 2014 and 2023. Using Critical Thematic Analysis and grounded in feminist media studies and critical mental health scholarship, the article analyses a qualitative corpus of reporting-oriented news items published in Público and Observador. The dataset consists of systematically selected articles in which mental health discourse functions as a substantive explanatory frame for sexual violence. Psychiatric, psychological, therapeutic, and metaphorical registers grant, withhold, or condition believability, allocating responsibility and organising care through norms of stability, risk, and expert verification. The analysis identified eight recurring discursive clusters through which mental health language stabilises truth claims: it can legitimise institutional authority, regulate survivors’ credibility, and explain perpetration through pathologising tropes, while often displacing structural accounts of gendered violence and reproducing ableist stigma. By specifying the credibility work performed by mental health discourse, the article contributes to debates on trauma-informed, survivor-centred, and anti-ableist reporting and proposes a transferable framework for analysing the sexual violence–mental health nexus in journalism.

1. Introduction

Journalistic reporting plays a central role in shaping how sexual violence is publicly understood, evaluated, and governed. News does not simply document harm; it produces regimes of meaning that define what counts as violence, who is credible, how responsibility is distributed, and which responses become legitimate (Tuerkheimer 2021; Brownmiller 1975; O’Hara 2012; Steiner 2020). These outcomes are not neutral effects of “information” but the product of narrative form, sourcing practices, and the normative assumptions that organise journalistic common sense.

This article focuses on sexual violence reporting as a site where credibility is continuously produced and contested through the mobilisation of mental health discourse. Sexual violence here is approached as a structurally gendered formation of power and as a cultural object whose meanings are stabilised or challenged through public storytelling. In press coverage, it becomes publicly intelligible through recurring conventions: what counts as evidence, which voices are amplified, which forms of affect are read as truthful, and which institutional procedures are treated as decisive. Credibility is therefore not an add-on to reporting; it is one of journalism’s core operations in sexual violence coverage (Yap 2017).

Over the past decade, mental health discourse has become a central vocabulary through which credibility work is performed. Therapeutic, psychological, and psychiatric frameworks increasingly organise truth claims, moral evaluation, and institutional legitimacy across social life (Illouz 2008; Madsen 2018; Rose 2018; Beeker et al. 2021; Salmenniemi et al. 2019).

Psychiatric, psychological, therapeutic, and trauma-related registers are routinely mobilised to describe survivors, interpret perpetrators, and legitimise institutional interventions. Trauma discourse operates as a form of cultural and political capital that shapes recognisability and believability (Britt and Hammett 2024; Watts 2024).

References to “instability,” “trauma,” “recovery,” “assessment,” and “treatment” often appear as clarifying context. Yet these terms also perform classificatory work. They differentiate whose accounts appear coherent enough to be believed, whose testimony is positioned as requiring expert validation, and which explanations of violence come to feel “reasonable” or complete (Caplan 1995; Rose 2018; Watts 2024). Feminist media studies have long shown that sexual violence reporting frequently reproduces rape myths and hierarchies of believability, privileging institutional voices and testing survivors’ testimony against norms of “proper” victimhood (Brownmiller 1975; Christie 1986; O’Hara 2012; Ventura 2014; Simões 2014; Santos et al. 2022; Garraio et al. 2023; Fricker 2007). Critical mental health scholarship shows how psychiatric and psychological knowledge circulates far beyond clinical settings as a technology of governance—authorising judgements about responsibility, risk, moral worth, and care (Marques 2023; Marques and Portugal 2025). In public discourse, mental health categories can legitimise suffering while also reproducing stigma and gatekeeping, sorting subjects into “rational/irrational,” “stable/unstable,” and “deserving/undeserving”—and, by extension, “credible/unreliable” (Corrigan and Watson 2002; Watts 2024).

This article brings feminist media studies into dialogue with critical mental health scholarship to argue that, in Portuguese reporting on sexual violence, mental health discourse operates as a credibility technology—that is, as a set of socio-technical and institutional mechanisms that organise believability. It establishes psychological and institutional thresholds through which testimony is evaluated, doubt is stabilised, empathy is distributed, and responsibility is reallocated. This dynamic is particularly significant in contemporary media environments where calls for trauma-informed and survivor-centred reporting coexist with enduring reliance on expert authority, forensic narration, and therapeutic closure (Gill and Orgad 2018; Gilmore 2023).

Portugal offers a revealing case through which to trace these dynamics. In recent years, public debate on sexual violence in Portugal has intensified in response to high-profile cases, institutional controversies, and feminist interventions. Yet journalistic practices remain strongly anchored in judicial logics, positioning institutions as primary arbiters of truth and credibility (Ventura 2014; Simões 2014; Santos et al. 2022; Garraio et al. 2023; Ventura 2018). Analysing how mental health discourse circulates within this media ecology helps to illuminate how global repertoires of psychologisation intersect with national journalistic norms and gendered credibility politics. In this article, it is approached as a situated context that allows broader processes of psychologisation and credibility politics to be examined. While some of the patterns identified are specific to the Portuguese media landscape—particularly the strong orientation toward judicial narratives and medico-legal expertise—others resonate with findings in international feminist media studies, suggesting scope for comparative analysis. Accordingly, this article examines how Portuguese news media mobilise mental health discourse in coverage of sexual violence between 2014 and 2023. Focusing on two influential media outlets—Público and Observador—it asks: How does mental health discourse organise credibility in journalistic narratives of sexual violence? Whose mental health is made visible, and with what effects on belief and blame? How do psychological framings interact with institutional authority and structural accounts of gendered harm?

The article makes three contributions. First, it examines how mental health discourse functions as a credibility technology in sexual violence reporting, reordering believability through norms of psychological coherence and institutional certification. Second, it analyses how this credibility work can depoliticise sexual violence by displacing structural explanations into individual pathology and therapeutic resolution. Third, it develops an empirically grounded framework of eight recurring discursive clusters (see

Table 1. Discursive Clusters and Modalities of Credibility Work in Observador and Público.

Discursive Cluster	Observador	Público	Shared Function
1. Institutional Legibility and the Politics of Proof	Condensed, court-centred reporting; psychiatric evaluation as procedural requirement	Expanded medico-legal and expert chains; clinical and forensic authority	Anchors credibility in institutional verification; privileges expert-mediated truth
2. Psychological Coherence and the “Good Victim”	Emphasis on performance under scrutiny (emotion + coherence in testimony)	Credibility routed through therapeutic trajectories and diagnostic legibility	Filters believability through norms of coherence, composure, and legible affect
3. Pathologising Accountability (“Mad Offender”)	Diagnostic/legal framing of (non-)responsibility; risk management	Forensic and psychiatric framing of danger and culpability	Reframes violence as individual pathology; displaces structural explanation
4. Trauma Recognition and Disciplinary Legibility	Acute, event-based trauma (e.g., breakdown, psychosis) as proof	Longitudinal trauma narratives (delay, therapy, recovery)	Establishes trauma as a dominant grammar of recognition and credibility
5. Therapeutic Containment and Narrative Closure	Institutional responses (services, reporting channels) as resolution	Administrative and service-based closure (quantification, support systems)	Translates violence into manageable aftermath; shifts focus to response over causality
6. Risk, Threat, and Psychologised Moral Panic	Predation scripts and alarmist framing; threat amplification	Behavioural typologies and psychology-inflected explanations of danger	Secures credibility through fear and risk; narrows interpretive space
7. Emotional Credibility and the Empathy Economy	Affective intensification (shock, indignation) tied to events	Collective emotional framing as legitimacy and moral consensus	Produces credibility through shared affective alignment
8. Metaphorical Psychiatry and Moral Abnormality	“Monster” figures as narrative shorthand and containment	Extension of monstrosity to systems (e.g., institutions, industries)	Moralises violence through abnormality; enables explanatory closure

) that map key mechanisms through which the sexual violence–mental health nexus is organised across the two outlets.

2. Theoretical Framework

This article puts feminist media studies into dialogue with critical mental health scholarship by treating mental health discourse as a credibility technology in journalistic narratives of sexual violence in Portugal. Feminist media studies have shown that sexual violence reporting is structured by rape myths, “ideal victim” expectations, and hierarchies of believability that unevenly distribute belief and doubt (Brownmiller 1975; Christie 1986; O’Hara 2012; Ventura 2014; Garraio et al. 2023). Survivors’ accounts are routinely evaluated against norms of coherence, emotional stability, rationality, and respectable victimhood, producing patterned credibility deficits for those who do not match these scripts (Christie 1986; Fricker 2007). What remains under-specified is how “psy” vocabularies help constitute those norms of credibility. This study approaches sexual violence as a broad analytical category encompassing rape, sexual assault, child sexual abuse, and other forms of sexual harm reported in the press. The focus is not on legal classification but on how journalistic discourse constructs sexual violence as a social problem.

Critical mental health scholarship shows how psychiatric and psychological knowledge circulates beyond clinical settings as a technology of governance, shaping norms of responsibility, danger, moral worth, and care (Foucault 1978; Caplan 1995; Rose 2018). In Portugal, critical mental health scholarship has similarly traced how psychiatric and psychological knowledge circulates beyond the clinic as a technology of citizenship, governance, and moral classification, shaping public reason and institutional legitimacy (Marques 2023; Marques and Portugal 2025). In public discourse, psychiatrisation and psychologisation translate social conflict and harm into individual pathology, risk, or recovery, narrowing what counts as an “acceptable” explanation of violence. Psychiatric categories are ambivalent: they can legitimise suffering while also reproducing stigma and gatekeeping—sorting subjects into “credible/unreliable” through proxies such as “stable/unstable,” “rational/irrational,” and “deserving/undeserving” (Corrigan and Watson 2002; Watts 2024). The conceptual hinge, then, is not that credibility hierarchies and psychiatrisation operate in parallel, but that they co-produce each other in sexual violence reporting. Mental health discourse becomes one of the mechanisms through which credibility is granted, withheld, or institutionally stabilised. Journalistic narratives do not only ask whether a survivor is believable; they often imply that believability depends on psychological legibility (coherence, composure, “appropriate” affect) and on whether expert validation can secure testimony within institutional proof regimes. Conversely, perpetrators’ violence may be reframed as a “snapping point,” instability, or abnormality, shifting accountability from structural gendered power to individual pathology and re-scripting what counts as a convincing explanation (Rose 2018).

To assess how this credibility technology operates, the article mobilises epistemic injustice (Fricker 2007; Medina 2013) as an analytic lens for patterned distortions in who is recognised as a knower and which interpretive resources are made available.

In Lusophone contexts, feminist legal and socio-legal scholarship has explicitly framed sexual violence as a site of epistemic injustice, showing how credibility deficits are systematically produced through gendered moral categories, psychiatric suspicion, and expectations of “respectable” victimhood (Ventura 2018; Ramos de Mello and Costa 2025). Testimonial injustice occurs when a speaker’s credibility is deflated (and/or others receive credibility excess) due to identity-linked prejudice and normative expectations (Fricker 2007). In sexual violence reporting, this can appear when survivors’ testimony is discounted unless it aligns with norms of composure, coherence, and institutional legibility, while institutional sources (police, courts) receive default credibility (Ahmed 2021). In psychiatrised narratives, credibility is frequently indexed to psychological legibility: accounts become more believable when calm, consistent, and certified; they become suspect when framed through instability, contradiction, or deviance. Hermeneutical injustice occurs when dominant interpretive resources misrecognise experience, or when the available vocabularies are insufficient (or overly narrow) for rendering harm intelligible (Fricker 2007). In sexual violence reporting, this can occur when coercion and gendered power are backgrounded in favour of individual trauma, pathology, or “coping,” crowding out structural accounts of institutional failure and inequality. Here, injustice can operate through both absence (lack of concepts) and over-availability: psychologising concepts can appear to explain everything while narrowing what counts as an acceptable explanation.

Trauma-informed approaches do not necessarily imply clinical diagnosis or the psychopathologization of individuals. Rather, trauma-informed frameworks aim to recognise the psychological and emotional consequences of violence while acknowledging the diversity of survivors’ experiences and trajectories. This article does not treat trauma-informed journalism as inherently problematic. Instead, it examines how trauma-based interpretive frameworks may become dominant explanatory resources in news reporting, sometimes narrowing the range of available interpretations by privileging psychological legibility over social or structural analysis. The concern is therefore not trauma-informed recognition itself, but the conditions under which psychiatric and psychological vocabularies become primary mechanisms for establishing credibility.

This framework specifies how mental health discourse can operate as a credibility technology in sexual violence reporting. Analytically, the article attends to three interlocking operations: (1) the production of psychological and institutional thresholds for believability (e.g., coherence, composure, diagnostic legibility, and procedural validation); (2) the anchoring of truth in expert and juridical authority (police, courts, clinicians) as default “credible” sources; and (3) the provision of narrative closure through therapeutic, psychiatric, or recovery-oriented resolutions. Importantly, the uptake of trauma-informed language does not automatically yield survivor-centred narratives: while trauma discourse can contest victim-blaming and validate suffering, it can also sediment scripts of “legible suffering,” intensify demands for certification over testimony, and re-render sexual violence as a governable therapeutic object rather than a structural manifestation of gendered power (Tuerkheimer 2021, Rose 2018; Banet-Weiser and Higgins 2023).

3. Research Design

This study adopts a qualitative, interpretive research design at the intersection of feminist media studies, critical mental health studies, and critical thematic analysis. Journalism is approached as a normative institution that produces public knowledge about harm, distributes responsibility, and governs credibility through patterned narrative and discursive choices.

Produced within the UnCoveR project, this article draws on the project axis dedicated to the systematic analysis of Portuguese media coverage of sexual violence. The research design proceeds in two stages, separating corpus construction and coding (Stage 1) from theory-driven interpretation (Stage 2).

In Stage 1, a corpus of mainstream Portuguese media references to sexual violence was assembled through systematic retrieval and protocol-based coding, covering the period 2011–2023. The timeframe begins with the Istanbul Convention as a key legal and political landmark in the prevention and public problematisation of gender-based violence and spans a period of intensified media visibility and institutional intervention. To capture variation in reach, audience, geography, and political orientation, the corpus includes one online newspaper, two print newspapers, two news magazines, and three national television news programmes from major Portuguese broadcasters.

Corpus construction drew on the project’s broader dataset of news coverage of sexual violence in Portuguese media, compiled through systematic keyword searches conducted via a professional media monitoring company that aggregates and indexes national news outputs. This service served as the primary retrieval infrastructure for identifying and collecting relevant items across outlets, ensuring consistency in search procedures and coverage. Items were curated into project databases and coded in NVivo using a tailored protocol combining standard media-analysis variables with sexual-violence-specific variables, including sense-making framings. Within this variable, “mental health” was operationalised as one possible explanatory frame and coded by target of attribution (perpetrator, victim/survivor, and third parties), enabling systematic identification of texts in which mental health discourse is mobilised to make sexual violence intelligible. In Stage 1, the “mental health” framing code was applied when an article mobilised psychological, psychiatric, or therapeutic language as part of the explanation, evaluation, or interpretation of sexual violence. This included: (i) explicit clinical terminology (e.g., trauma, PTSD, depression, psychiatric evaluation, diagnosis, therapy); (ii) psychological descriptors of behaviour or state (e.g., instability, breakdown, emotional disturbance, dissociation); (iii) references to treatment, assessment, or expert intervention; and (iv) metaphorical or vernacular psychiatric language (e.g., “madness,” “monster,” “abnormality”) when used to classify or explain actors. Articles were coded only when such references performed substantive explanatory work, rather than appearing as incidental or passing mentions. This included:

(1)

Clinical and diagnostic terms (e.g., mental health, trauma, PTSD, depression, psychiatric evaluation, psychological assessment, disorder);

(2)

Affective and psychological states (e.g., instability, distress, breakdown, emotional disturbance, crisis);

(3)

Addiction-related and behavioural vocabularies, where linked to psychological explanation (e.g., alcohol abuse, drug use, sex dependency);

(4)

Institutional and medico-legal references (e.g., internment, psychiatric hospital, treatment, therapy, follow-up);

(5)

Vernacular and metaphorical psychiatric language (e.g., madness, monster, unstable, abnormal).

Coding was triggered not by the mere presence of these terms, but when such language functioned as a substantive interpretive frame, contributing to explanation, credibility, or responsibility attribution.

The analysis focuses on two Portuguese newspapers: Público, a long-established national daily with a print legacy and strong online presence, and Observador, a digital-born outlet launched in 2014 and commonly positioned within the centre-right to right-leaning media landscape. Newspapers were selected due to their central role in the Portuguese media ecology as agenda-setters and key nodes of intermedia circulation, as well as their relatively stable reporting formats and explicit attribution practices. These characteristics make them particularly suitable for analysing how explanatory frameworks and credibility regimes are constructed and normalised over time. The timeframe 2014–2023 enables a coherent comparison across both outlets, given that Observador began publishing in 2014.

From this broader corpus, Stage 2 proceeded in two steps. First, all news items assigned the NVivo code “mental health” were extracted, yielding a dataset of 706 articles in which mental health discourse had already been identified as a substantive interpretive frame. Within this dataset, attention was paid to the co-occurrence of mental health discourse with adjacent semantic fields, including addiction (e.g., alcohol, drugs, dependency), social marginality (e.g., unemployment, social exclusion), and institutionalisation (e.g., psychiatric evaluation, internment). These co-occurrences were analytically significant, as they frequently operated together to produce explanatory chains linking psychological instability, deviance, and violence.

Second, a focused selection process was applied to this dataset in order to construct a sub-corpus aligned with the study’s analytical aims. The analysis was restricted to reporting-oriented genres—standard news articles, long-form reports, and interview-based pieces—on the grounds that news reporting constitutes the institutional and normative core of journalistic knowledge production. Unlike opinion formats, reporting claims epistemic authority and thus provides a particularly relevant site for examining credibility as a routine epistemic operation, grounded in conventions such as sourcing, verification, attribution, and narrative authority.

Within these parameters, articles were included when mental health discourse functioned as a central explanatory or interpretive frame. Items were excluded when references to mental health were peripheral, incidental, or limited to brief mentions without interpretive relevance, as well as when they belonged to opinion, editorial, or commentary formats. In cases of ambiguity, inclusion was guided by whether mental health discourse contributed substantively to explanations of credibility, causality, or responsibility.

This sequential filtering reduced the initial set of 706 articles to a final sub-corpus of 93 reporting pieces, comprising 41 articles from Público and 52 from Observador. This sub-corpus constitutes a targeted analytical sample, designed to capture how mental health operates as a structuring explanatory frame in journalistic reporting, rather than a statistically representative subset of all sexual violence coverage in the two outlets.

The corpus includes reporting on sexual violence involving adult victims, minors, and mixed populations, as well as national and international cases, shaped by contexts of peace, war and armed conflict, as well as migration trajectories. These categories were not treated as separate analytical variables because the study focuses on the discursive functions of mental health language rather than on victim typologies or geographical context. Building on this selection, Stage 2 examines how mental health discourse shapes explanations, responsibility judgments, credibility judgments, institutional responses, moral evaluations, and narrative closure within this targeted set of texts. The excerpts cited in this analysis are illustrative of recurring discursive patterns identified across the sub-corpus rather than isolated case studies.

The sub-corpus was analysed through Critical Thematic Analysis (Lawless and Chen 2019), treating themes not as neutral content categories but as recurrent discursive operations—textual ways of regulating believability, allocating responsibility, organising moral judgement, and securing narrative endings. The analysis followed a hybrid strategy combining theoretically informed coding with inductive theme development. Initial coding categories were informed by feminist media studies and critical mental health scholarship, particularly concepts related to credibility, psychiatrisation, and epistemic injustice, while the final discursive clusters emerged through iterative comparison and refinement during the coding process.

Analysis proceeded through sustained close reading, memo-writing, and comparative interpretation across outlets and across time. Repeated readings supported immersion in lexical choices, narrative roles, attribution patterns, and shifting distributions of narrative authority. Manual open coding identified recurring formulations and rhetorical moves, including evidentiary stabilisation, delegitimation, exoneration, moralisation, and narrative containment. Axial mapping and analytic memo-writing were used to relate codes across cases and outlets, refining interpretive propositions and clarifying how discursive operations clustered and travelled. The final stage consolidated codes into discursive clusters defined by rhetorical function and ideological effect, with particular attention to credibility governance as a structuring dimension of the coverage. The analytical process proceeded through three iterative steps. First, open coding identified recurring discursive moves across the corpus, including forms of evidentiary stabilisation, expert validation, emotional regulation, and risk framing. Second, these initial codes were refined through axial comparison across articles and outlets, identifying patterns of co-occurrence and shared rhetorical function. Third, codes were consolidated into eight discursive clusters (see Table 1), defined by their role in organising credibility, including processes of legitimising, filtering, pathologising, and containing. For example, references to “psychiatric evaluation,” “expert assessment,” and “clinical report” were initially coded as distinct instances of expert mediation. Through iterative comparison, these codes were found to consistently co-occur in passages where credibility depended on institutional verification. They were subsequently grouped within the cluster Institutional Legibility and the Politics of Proof, where mental health expertise functions as a mechanism for stabilising truth claims.

The study reflects the situated interpretive judgement of a single researcher. Rigour was supported through systematic coding procedures, iterative comparison across articles, and explicit documentation of analytical decisions. Patterns were identified through repeated engagement with the corpus rather than through isolated examples. The staged design prioritised interpretive depth and theoretical saturation over statistical representativeness while maintaining traceability from Stage 1 coding decisions to Stage 2 analytical claims.

Because the analysis focuses on two national reference newspapers, the findings describe patterns specific to Público and Observador rather than Portuguese journalism as a whole. The study therefore identifies discursive tendencies within these two influential national outlets rather than providing a comprehensive account of media coverage.

The following questions guided the analysis:

Credibility and distribution: Whose mental health becomes relevant to establishing credibility, and with what effects on testimony, doubt, and authority?

Norms and hierarchies: What assumptions about stability, rationality, vulnerability, deviance, and “proper” victimhood underpin credibility judgements?

Discursive functions: How does mental health language operate to validate or delegitimise survivors, explain or soften perpetration, and privilege institutional verification?

Silences and displacement: What structural accounts (e.g., patriarchy, institutional power, inequality) are backgrounded when mental health provides explanatory force and narrative closure?

Together, these questions guide the analysis toward the epistemic and moral work through which mental health discourse shapes what sexual violence reporting makes believable, legible, and governable.

While the analysis is qualitative and does not aim at statistical representativeness, references to recurrence (e.g., “frequent,” “recurrent,” or “across the sub-corpus”) indicate patterns identified through repeated engagement with the dataset of 93 articles, rather than isolated instances.

4. Findings

Across the analysed coverage in Público and Observador, mental health discourse operates as a credibility technology: a set of psychiatric, psychological, therapeutic, and metaphorical registers through which journalistic routines sort (a) what counts as knowable sexual violence, (b) who is positioned as believable, and (c) which accounts can be stabilised as institutionally valid “facts”. Across the corpus, mental health language performs credibility work by: (i) anchoring claims in expert/procedural verification; (ii) filtering survivors’ believability through norms of coherence, stability, and legible affect; and (iii) reallocating responsibility through pathologising framings of perpetrators and moral-abnormality semantics. To specify how this credibility technology operates in practice, the analysis identifies eight recurring discursive clusters (see Table 1). The clusters are not mutually exclusive; they capture patterned operations that frequently co-occur within the same item. The excerpts and items cited in each cluster are illustrative rather than “single case studies”: they are used to demonstrate typical discursive moves found across the sub-corpus, not to treat one item as representative on its own. The eight discursive clusters are distinguished by their primary rhetorical and epistemic function in organising credibility. While some clusters share conceptual proximity (e.g., trauma recognition, emotional credibility, and therapeutic closure), they are analytically differentiated according to the specific work they perform: recognition (making harm intelligible), evaluation (sorting believability), and closure (resolving narrative trajectories). Overlaps reflect the co-occurrence of these functions in journalistic texts rather than a lack of analytical distinction.

4.1. Institutional Legibility and the Politics of Proof

In both outlets, credibility is routinely stabilised through institutional verification. Medico-legal procedures, psychiatric and psychological assessments, expert testimony, and documentary traces function as epistemic anchors: they translate allegations and experiences into institutionally admissible knowledge. In this register, mental health expertise becomes part of the proof infrastructure—certifying stability, risk, and responsibility—and shifts the centre of credibility away from lived testimony and toward authorised institutional actors (Ahmed 2021). Psychological and psychiatric frameworks appear not merely as consequences of violence but as conditions of legibility: mechanisms through which violence is rendered intelligible, governable, and actionable in public discourse.

In Observador, this logic often appears in a condensed, court-forward mode, where mental health assessment is framed as procedural necessity. For instance, in coverage on the judicial reasons why a suspect accused of child sexual abuse was not detained, the report foregrounds compulsory evaluation as a condition of adjudication—“the defendant is required to undergo a psychiatric evaluation …”1 (Branco 2020b)—followed by managerial language that folds diagnosis and treatment into the evidentiary narrative. Here, mental health discourse functions as a procedural gatekeeper: what counts as knowable is what can be assessed, documented, and governed. The evaluative apparatus becomes a technology of truth-production, calibrating responsibility, risk, and institutional readiness to act.

In Público, institutional legibility more often appears as an expanded chain linking credibility to professional authority and medico-legal competence, extending proof beyond the courtroom to the clinic and specialist knowledge production. In an interview on child sexual abuse, legitimacy is built through institutional positioning and technical proximity to evidentiary practice: “Anabela Neves is a doctor at the Institute of Legal Medicine specialising in sexual abuse,” whose work consists of “conducting medical examinations of child abusers and their victims” (Gerschenfeld and Henriques 2014). The piece grounds public understanding in the materiality of medico-legal work—injury, invasive examinations (“they may even require surgical care”)—and in expert epistemic labour, including a neuropsychology Ph.D. on “neuronal changes… in the brains of abused children.” Here, mental health discourse functions as an authorising vocabulary that translates harm into clinically legible consequences (post-traumatic stress, impacts on executive function), evidentiary details (gynaecological/anu-rectal exams), and institutional actionability. Psychological and neurocognitive registers do double work: they evidence violence and reaffirm institutional authority as the privileged site from which truth can be produced.

Across the analysed coverage in both outlets, sexual violence becomes publicly knowable insofar as it is translated into medico-legal and mental health documentation. This yields an epistemic hierarchy in which institutional actors accumulate credibility excess (Yap 2017), while survivor testimony is positioned as most credible when it can be absorbed into authorised procedures, assessments, and professional vocabularies. In terms of epistemic injustice, this pattern reflects testimonial injustice, as survivors’ accounts are treated as insufficient unless supported by institutional and expert validation.

This pattern recurs across the sub-corpus in both outlets, including instances of court reporting and expert-led narratives in which psychiatric evaluation and medico-legal authority function as conditions for establishing credibility.

4.2. Psychological Coherence and the “Good Victim”

Mental health discourse also operates as a credibility filter, installing norms of psychological coherence and emotionally legible behaviour that shape who can be believed. Survivors are more readily positioned as credible when their narratives align with expectations of composure, clarity, consistency, and recognisable affect (Tuerkheimer 2021); conversely, affective excess, contradiction, delay, dissociation, or visible distress can be re-coded as instability, something to be contained, explained, or translated through an authorised expert register. Credibility is thus sorted through standards of psychological legibility, where “believable” testimony becomes tied to norms about what a stable, coherent subject should look and sound like.

In Observador, this sorting appears through affect-management cues embedded into the evidentiary scene. In an item that condenses courtroom testimony into striking phrases, credibility is staged through performance under scrutiny: “In two emotional hearings, the accuser and the accused spoke and answered every question” (Branco 2018a). The formulation performs a dual function: it acknowledges emotional intensity (“emotional hearings”) while stabilising credibility through procedural completeness (“answered every question”). Emotion is permitted, insofar as it remains compatible with coherence, composure, and the capacity to perform intelligibility under institutional questioning.

In Público, psychological coherence is more often routed in support and repair infrastructures, where suffering becomes credible by being narratable within recognised clinical trajectories. In a 2014 report on specialist services for rape victims, harm is rendered intelligible through diagnostic language and therapeutic temporality—“…post-traumatic stress… it’s a lot of trauma work, it takes time” (Viana 2014). The article grounds credibility in clinically recognisable aftermath: panic attacks, withdrawal and the need for specialised psychological intervention. These descriptions validate harm, while reinforcing a script in which credibility is strengthened when trauma unfolds in ways legible to psy vocabularies and institutional timelines.

Across both outlets, believability is conditional—mediated through psychological legibility (coherence, composure, affect regulation) and institutional recognisability (expert language, therapeutic trajectories, authorised aftermath). Survivors are most readily credible when they can be read as the “good victim”, consistent, comprehensible, and emotionally intelligible within established frameworks, while those whose presentation reflects common trauma responses risk being interpreted through the language of instability. This dynamic illustrates testimonial injustice, as credibility becomes contingent on conformity to normative expectations of psychological coherence and respectable victimhood.

This pattern is recurrent across the sub-corpus in both Público and Observador where survivors’ credibility is implicitly evaluated through norms of emotional regulation, narrative consistency, and psychological legibility.

4.3. Pathologising Accountability: The “Mad Offender”

Across the analysed coverage, perpetrator accountability is frequently reframed through mental health discourse in ways that render sexual violence publicly intelligible as individual abnormality—instability, disorder, dangerousness, “snapping,” psychiatric evaluation, and clinical categorisation. In this register, pathology functions as an explanatory shortcut that renders violence exceptional and governable, while displacing structural accounts of gendered power, coercion, and institutional permissiveness. Credibility is stabilised by turning the perpetrator into a knowable risk-object—someone whose actions can be interpreted, predicted, and managed through psychiatric language.

In Observador, this often takes the form of diagnostic risk governance, where the response is narrated as assessment and management. In a report on intimate-partner sexual violence, the headline centres psychiatric (non-)accountability—“Rapist who tortured his girlfriend is deemed not criminally responsible and will spend three years in prison-hospital” (Novais 2019). Violence is reframed as less gendered practice and more clinical–legal status (non-criminal responsibility) and containment pathway (prison–hospital). The explanatory horizon shifts to what can be psychiatrically classified, securitised, and managed.

In Público, forensic and psychiatric expertise similarly shape culpability narratives by foregrounding risk, diagnosis, and assessment. In sentencing coverage such as “Confessed perpetrator of abuse against babies sentenced to 25 years in prison” (Henriques 2019), legal judgement is framed through institutional response, while references to forensic evaluation and psychiatric assessment render the offender intelligible as a subject whose danger can be assessed. Even where the legal narrative affirms accountability, clinical vocabularies remain central to interpreting perpetration. Across both outlets, explanation narrows to pathology (a clinical/risk event) rather than gendered power (a social and institutional condition). This produces a response model oriented toward assessment and containment—psychiatric classification, risk management, institutional sequestration—rather than structural critique, prevention, and accountability for enabling environments.

Across the sub-corpus, this pattern recurs consistently across both outlets, where perpetrator behaviour is interpreted through psychiatric or risk-based frameworks that reframe accountability in terms of individual pathology.

4.4. Trauma Recognition and Disciplinary Legibility

Trauma discourse functions as a dominant grammar of recognition: it makes sexual violence publicly intelligible as enduring harm while disciplining what counts as “real” suffering through clinically and culturally legible scripts—symptoms, diagnoses, recovery arcs, and therapeutic timelines. In this register, mental health language expands what can be named but also establishes thresholds of intelligibility: harm becomes most believable when it can be narrated through recognisable trauma trajectories and validated through therapeutic or psychiatric legibility.

In Observador, trauma recognition often appears as aftermath-as-proof, where the credibility of violence is anchored in the clinical extremity of its consequences. In coverage of Lady Gaga’s disclosure, the article foregrounds a “psychotic episode” (Gonçalves 2021) as a high-intensity marker of harm, translating sexual violence into a recognisable psychiatric event that secures the seriousness of what happened. Recognition is thus stabilised through diagnostic visibility: the more acute and nameable the psychological breakdown, the more publicly legible—and therefore credible—the violence becomes.

In Público, trauma recognition more often appears through temporal depth and repair infrastructures, making harm legible via delayed disclosure, therapeutic engagement, and the slow work of living with trauma. In the report on Quebrar o Silêncio—a Portuguese NGO that provides specialised support and advocacy for men and boys who have experienced sexual violence, offering psychological, peer, and mutual-support services—credibility is rooted through latency—namely discussing disclosure “20 to 30 years after sexual abuse”(Flor 2019)—and through conditions that make it possible. Trauma becomes an organising force across the life course: risk-taking behaviours, dissociation, difficulties “living inside one’s own head,” and gradual reconstitution of narrative control through specialised support. Harm is recognised not only because it is diagnosable (post-traumatic stress, anxiety crises), but because it is narratable within an authorised trajectory of validation, intervention, and partial recovery—“the necessary tools to deal with it.”

Across both outlets, trauma discourse widens vocabularies of harm while functioning as a threshold of intelligibility: suffering becomes most publicly legible—and therefore most credible—when it conforms to clinicalised scripts of aftermath, either as an acute, nameable event (breakdown, psychosis, collapse) or as an institutionalised arc (delay, disclosure, therapy, recovery work). This pattern also reflects hermeneutical injustice, as psychological vocabularies become dominant interpretive resources that narrow the range of meanings through which sexual violence can be publicly understood.

This pattern recurs across the sub-corpus in both outlets, where trauma discourse operates as a dominant grammar of recognition, shaping which experiences of violence become publicly legible and credible.

4.5. Therapeutic Containment and Narrative Closure

In the analysed news pieces, mental health discourse frequently supplies the “what happens next” that enables sexual violence stories to conclude. Counselling, referrals, helplines, intake procedures, and specialised support structures operate as narrative closure devices: they translate harm into a pathway, a service, or an administrative response. This reframes violence as a problem of individual aftermath and service management, shifting attention from how violence is enabled, normalised, or institutionally tolerated toward how it can be handled, processed, and followed up. Within this register, sexual violence becomes governable less through political explanation, institutional accountability, or prevention, and more through managed care and procedural responsiveness.

This therapeutic turn also produces a containment effect. By naming support, narratives signal seriousness and care—reducing pressure to sustain scrutiny of institutional conditions. The event moves from conflict (responsibility, complicity, power) into response (triage, referral, service provision). Mental health becomes a legitimising language of institutional ethics—proof of responsiveness—while narrowing the horizon of change to what services can absorb.

In Observador, closure often occurs through institutional service creation. Coverage of the University of Minho’s response to sexual violence cases on campus revolves around infrastructure-building—“The University of Minho will create a specialised psychological support service, as well as reporting channels” (Agência Lusa 2023)—stabilising the narrative at the moment when harm becomes administratively and therapeutically processable. The story ends at institutional demonstrability (services, channels), rather than sustained interrogation of culture, prevention, or power on campus; therapeutic provision functions as visible reputational repair.

In Público, closure often appears through quantification and service uptake. In reporting on Grupo VITA—a Portuguese institutional support structure established to handle disclosures of sexual abuse within the Catholic Church context—, action is measured through demand: “Grupo VITA received 16 requests for help in its first week of operation” (Faria 2023). Credibility attaches to administrative legibility: requests counted, systems activated, response underway. Quantification performs a double move: it frames help-seeking as evidence that the system works, while nudging interpretation toward case flow and capacity, rather than toward prevention or structural accountability.

Across both outlets, therapeutic and administrative infrastructures function as proxies for resolution. Help systems—specialised services, intake channels, quantified demand—stand in for “doing something,” producing a depoliticising effect: narratives close at the point where suffering becomes manageable, not at the point where violence becomes less likely. This pattern appears repeatedly in the sub-corpus both in Público and Observador, where references to services, support infrastructures, and institutional responses function as narrative closure mechanisms.

4.6. Risk, Threat, and Psychologised Moral Panic

Risk semantics intensify credibility through alarm: perpetrators are framed as dangerous, predatory, and unpredictable—often through quasi-clinical language that renders them legible as risk subjects. Here, mental health discourse enters indirectly, not necessarily as “mental illness” explicitly, but as a shared vocabulary of assessment, profiling, behavioural prediction, and manageability. Fear becomes an evidentiary amplifier: urgency substitutes for explanation, and threat categories compress interpretive space by offering certainty about what kind of event this is and how it should be governed. The perpetrator is approached less as a social actor embedded in relations and institutions and more as a “case”: a risky personality or deviant pattern to be monitored, contained, or neutralised.

In Observador, this logic appears through condensed predation labels that stabilise moral clarity via danger. In a report clustering multiple crimes, the category performs explanatory work: “the modus operandi of these ‘predators’ (Branco 2020a). By invoking “predators,” the narrative bypasses social, institutional, or relational context and foregrounds a recognisable figure presumed to be self-explanatory—functioning like diagnostic shorthand that explains by naming a type.

This risk framing is reinforced through preventive and protectionist narratives that mobilise fear as a form of governance. In coverage addressing children’s exposure on digital platforms, sexual violence is anticipated rather than explained, framed as an ever-present threat embodied by a lurking aggressor: “Dulce Rocha2 explains that many images of children end up in the hands of sexual predators, who use this information.” (Nunes 2015). “Sexual predators” operates as a moral anchor translating diffuse anxieties about technology and visibility into a singular threatening figure; the imagined solution space bends toward vigilance, screening, restriction, and surveillance—forms of preventive “risk management” that echo mental health-adjacent repertoires of monitoring and safeguarding.

In Público, risk is also constructed through behavioural typologies that render predation intelligible as a knowable and repeatable pattern. In the aforementioned interview with Anabela Neves on child sexual abuse, threat is articulated through psychology-inflected descriptors: “The predator is a seducer, a manipulator…” (Gerschenfeld and Henriques 2014). While this framing appears explanatory, it often narrows interpretive focus to how perpetrators act (tactics, grooming) rather than why they are enabled to act or where safeguards fail. Psychological intelligibility becomes a substitute for political explanation.

Across both outlets, risk discourse produces a psychologised moral panic in which sexual violence becomes believable primarily through danger scripts. Threat categories organise interpretation toward containment, protectionism, and control, marginalising structural prevention, institutional responsibility, and cultural permissiveness. Credibility is secured through fear rather than explanation; narratives are resolved by narrowing interpretive space and making containment appear as common sense.

This pattern emerges as a recurrent pattern across the dataset in both outlets where sexual violence is framed through threat, predation, and risk-based narratives that prioritise containment over explanation.

4.7. Emotional Credibility and the Empathy Economy

Affective language—shock, indignation, compassion, devastation—produces credibility by making sexual violence feel true. Mental health-adjacent vocabularies of distress, trauma, suffering, and emotional harm provide an authorised register through which that feeling is rendered intelligible. Credibility is thus not only procedural or expert-based but also affective: a shared emotional orientation becomes a form of proof. To recognise the violence is to feel it correctly, and to feel it correctly is to align with a moral and psychological consensus.

In Observador, affective consensus is often anchored to legal controversy and public reaction. In reporting on protests related to the La Manada3 decision, the item foregrounds: “…they joined the chorus of indignation over the judicial decision.” (Bruno 2018). Indignation becomes an evidentiary mood that stabilises interpretation through shared moral feeling.

In Público, collective affect often functions as a signal of legitimacy, shaping the moral meaning of events and institutional responses. In coverage of the Catholic Church sexual abuse in Portugal, in response to the Church’s handling of the Independent Commission’s findings4, the framing centres communal emotional evaluation: “The Church’s response generates disappointment and indignation.” (Faria Moreira and Begonha 2023). Outrage is positioned as the appropriate response, producing a public “we” whose feeling ratifies seriousness. Emotional response operates as a diagnostic instrument: indignation confirms harm and moral recognisability.

Across both outlets, this affective economy resonates with mental health discourse, in which emotional articulation is treated as both evidence and remedy. Emotional visibility becomes a proxy for seriousness, but it can also displace analysis of institutional cultures, legal frameworks, gendered power relations, and historical continuities that exceed immediacy. Emotional credibility amplifies recognition and urgency while risking interpretive closure at the level of affective consensus.

Across the sub-corpus, this pattern recurs in both outlets, where affective responses such as indignation, shock, or compassion operate as markers of credibility and moral alignment.

4.8. Metaphorical Psychiatry and Vernacular Moral Classification

This cluster differs from previous ones by focusing on vernacular and metaphorical uses of psychiatric language, rather than formal clinical discourse. While earlier clusters examine how psychiatric and psychological expertise operates institutionally—through diagnosis, assessment, trauma frameworks, and expert validation—this section analyses how psychiatric semantics circulate in everyday journalistic language as a form of moral classification. These metaphorical uses do not replace clinical discourse but extend its classificatory logic into a vernacular register.

Alongside the more formal clinical and therapeutic discourses examined in previous clusters, psychiatric semantics circulate metaphorically to condemn sexual violence—“monster”, “madness”, “insanity”, “aberration”. These terms deliver narrative closure while recycling connections between pathology and violence and displacing ordinariness (entitlement, coercive contexts, institutional complicity). In this vernacular register, credibility is achieved through moral sorting: violence becomes legible as the act of an abnormal figure. Because these labels borrow the authority and immediacy of clinical naming, they operate like a pseudo-diagnosis, classifying the event, assigning a “type” of person, and implying a corresponding management response (isolate, remove, contain).

This metaphorical use of psychiatric language extends the classificatory work described in earlier clusters. Where formal clinical discourse attributes credibility through expert evaluation and diagnostic categories, vernacular psychiatric language performs a parallel operation through moral sorting. Violence becomes legible as the act of an abnormal figure, and credibility is achieved through symbolic classification rather than institutional verification.

In Observador, monstrosity often functions as narrative containment, collapsing complexity into a single moral category. “Fritzl, the monster of Amstetten …” does immediate interpretive work (Branco 2018b). The label secures condemnation and stabilises the event as exceptional, but it also encourages a reading in which violence is in aberrant individuals rather than enabling conditions. The “monster” frame produces certainty and makes explanation feel unnecessary, mimicking the logic of categorical diagnosis: once the label is attached, the narrative can move directly to control measures rather than tracing causality, complicity, or prevention.

This vernacular psychiatric intersects with therapeutic and administrative closure (Section 4.5): where services and procedures offer “what happens next,” monstrosity offers “what this is.” Together, they form a closed circuit of recognisability: abnormal perpetrator → legible harm → managerial response. What drops out is the social ecology in which sexual violence is produced and tolerated—gendered entitlement, peer cultures, organisational silence, legal attrition, and institutional incentives that keep harm privately handled rather than publicly accountable.

In Público, particularly in #MeToo-era cultural coverage, monstrousness can extend from perpetrator to system. In an item on Rose McGowan’s memoir Brave and the documentary series Citizen Rose5, the article frames Harvey Weinstein as a symptom of a wider system, producing a metaphor that escalates from person to structure: “the ‘monster’: the monster Harvey, but also the monster Hollywood” (Amaral Cardoso 2018). The move expands blame and names complicity, yet it remains anchored in a psychiatric-inflected abnormality grammar that risks reinforcing stigma. Even where “Hollywood” is targeted, the system is imagined as diseased or contaminated—an organism requiring excision rather than political transformation. In terms of credibility, metaphorical psychiatry functions as a proof device: the more “mad” or “monstrous” the figure, the less the narrative must demonstrate. But this proof narrows interpretive space, invites punitive containment as common sense, and sidelines analytic work on preventable pathways, accountability failures, and everyday permissions that make sexual violence persistently possible.

This pattern recurs consistently across both outlets in both Público and Observador, where metaphorical psychiatric language functions as a form of moral classification that stabilises interpretation while narrowing causal explanation.

While these clusters represent recurring interpretive patterns, the corpus also displayed important variation. Some articles relied primarily on legal or institutional framings, with little reference to mental health discourse, while others mobilised psychological language in more limited, descriptive ways. These variations suggest that mental health discourse is not uniformly present in sexual violence reporting, but becomes particularly influential in articles where credibility, causality, and moral evaluation are explicitly at stake.

5. Discussion

This article examined how mental health discourse functions as a credibility infrastructure in Portuguese journalistic representations of sexual violence (2014–2023) across two major national newspapers, Observador and Público. Across the dataset, psychiatric, psychological, therapeutic, and metaphorical registers do not simply “add context”: they help determine who is believable, what counts as knowledge, and which forms of evidence and authority can stabilise uncertainty. This credibility work is carried out through interlocking mechanisms: the privileging of institutional proof (psychiatric reports, expert testimony, medico-legal documentation) (Ahmed 2021), the use of psychologised narratives to produce closure (trauma/recovery scripts), and the moralisation of violence through metaphorical psychiatry. These dynamics are consequential not only for how responsibility is allocated but also for how ableist norms of coherence, stability, and “legible suffering” condition whose accounts are granted authority in public discourse (Foucault 1978; Caplan 1995; Rose 2018; Fricker 2007).

Bringing Portuguese scholarship into the frame sharpens the specificity of this argument. Work on sexual violence in Portuguese media has shown how credibility and rape-myth dynamics are routinely mediated by journalistic conventions, institutional sourcing, and patriarchal common sense—while also identifying moments where journalism can resist or rework those myths (e.g., Garraio et al. 2023). In parallel, Portuguese critical mental health research and debate have traced how psychiatric and psychological knowledge travels through citizenship, rights, governance, and public reason—well beyond the clinic—shaping moral categories, responsibility, and legitimate care (e.g., Marques 2023). Placed in dialogue, these studies clarify why the mental health lexicon is such a powerful credibility technology in sexual violence reporting: it provides both an institutional pathway for proof and a culturally familiar grammar for moral judgement and narrative closure. At the same time, feminist critiques of perpetrator “exceptionalism” help specify how psychiatric and metaphorical framings can displace structural explanation by relocating violence in the figure of the abnormal individual (Tranchese 2023; Ventura 2014).

• Mental Health as a Credibility Infrastructure in Sexual Violence Reporting

The findings show that in this dataset “mental health” operates less as a clinical referent than as a journalistic device that helps make sexual violence publicly knowable by sorting credibility and stabilising explanation. In both outlets, references to psychological “instability,” “trauma,” “assessment,” and “treatment” routinely organise the interpretive field: they indicate where certainty should be located (experts and institutions), what forms of suffering are recognisable (those that fit established scripts), and which accounts can be treated as reliable. This aligns with feminist media studies’ long-standing argument that journalism not only reports sexual violence but also actively produces regimes of meaning that shape believability and responsibility (Brownmiller 1975; O’Hara 2012; Ventura 2014; Garraio et al. 2023).

Importantly, the point is not that mental health language is inherently harmful or should be avoided. Rather, the analysis shows its ambivalence: it can name harm and signal the need for care, while also functioning as a gatekeeping grammar that privileges institutional validation and disciplines survivor narration into norms of composure, coherence, and recognisable injury. In this sense, mental health discourse becomes part of the cultural apparatus through which rape-myth dynamics and credibility hierarchies are reproduced—often in ways that appear neutral, technical, or compassionate. More specifically, it can (i) make survivors’ credibility conditional on psychological legibility and institutional certification, while (ii) casting perpetrators through abnormality grammars that individualise causality and shorten structural explanation (Tranchese 2023).

• Psychologisation, Depoliticisation, and the Management of Harm

A second pattern concerns how credibility governance is reinforced through psychologised closure. Across the analysed corpus, violence is frequently translated into individualised narratives of distress, trauma, coping, and recovery. These framings can acknowledge lasting harm, yet they also narrow explanatory horizons by relocating interpretive weight from structural power relations (gendered inequality, institutional cultures, coercive contexts) to interior states and therapeutic trajectories (Rose 2018). As a result, the political and institutional conditions under which sexual violence is enabled—alongside the collective dimensions of accountability—can be displaced by story arcs oriented toward treatment, assessment, and personal resolution.

This matters for credibility because “recovery” and “trauma” scripts perform a dual function: they can validate survivors by marking harm as real, but they also risk establishing normative expectations about how credible suffering should appear, be narrated, and be evidenced. Where survivors’ accounts do not align with these scripts (for instance, through anger, silence, contradiction, delay, or non-linear memory), credibility becomes easier to withdraw—even when those responses are fully compatible with coercion and trauma. In effect, therapeutic narrativity can operate as a soft evidentiary threshold: it expands recognition for some testimonies while making others easier to discount.

• Institutional Legibility and the Politics of Proof

The central “engine room” of credibility adjudication in this corpus is institutional legibility. In both outlets, sexual violence is repeatedly narrated through judicial and quasi-judicial logics in which psychiatric/psychological expertise is treated as a privileged route to truth: evaluations, expert testimony, medico-legal documentation, and procedural infrastructures are presented as epistemic anchors that stabilise uncertainty and authorise interpretation. This creates an evidentiary hierarchy in which lived testimony is frequently filtered through institutional certification—an arrangement that resonates with Portuguese analyses of the judicialisation/proceduralisation of public narratives of sexual violence and the media’s reliance on institutional sources.

Epistemic injustice helps specify what is at stake here (Fricker 2007; Medina 2013). Survivors’ credibility is often not assessed in isolation; it is made conditional on meeting thresholds that are simultaneously institutional and psychological—coherence, stability, corroboration, and expert-verifiable harm. In parallel, institutional sources (courts, police, experts) frequently receive credibility excess, becoming the default arbiters of what counts as knowledge. In this configuration, mental health discourse becomes a particularly effective credibility gate: it can legitimise suffering when translated into institutionally recognisable categories, while also casting doubt when a speaker is framed as unstable, contradictory, or deviant. This “politics of proof” is not only gendered but psychiatrically scaffolded: psychological categories and expert mediation become a routinised pathway for transforming testimony into public fact.

• Metaphorical Psychiatry and the Moralisation of Violence

Beyond formal clinical registers, metaphorical psychiatry (“madness,” “insanity,” “monster”) operates as a moral shorthand that condemns violence while also shaping what is thinkable about it. These labels can deliver outrage and narrative certainty, but they also risk reinforcing stigma by naturalising associations between mental illness and violence (Corrigan and Watson 2002). Moreover, by casting perpetrators as aberrant or inhuman, metaphorical psychiatry can contribute to explanatory closure—marking sexual violence as exceptional deviance rather than as an ordinary, structurally enabled expression of gendered entitlement and institutional permissiveness.

Here, two strands of feminist scholarship are especially helpful for sharpening what is at stake. Tranchese (2023) shows how the figure of the “monster rapist” operates as a discursive technology of alterisation: it isolates sexual violence in an exceptional, deviant perpetrator and thereby helps societies imagine violence as an anomaly rather than a pervasive relation of power. Ventura (2014) similarly argues that media narratives often organise sexual violence through polarising imaginaries—“angels” and “demons” (angels and demons)—that produce moral clarity while enabling collective dissociation from the ordinariness of sexual violence. Read alongside the present corpus, these arguments clarify that metaphorical psychiatry does more than intensify condemnation: it reorganises causality and accountability, bending explanation toward individual abnormality and away from institutional cultures, everyday permissions, and structural inequalities that make sexual violence persistently possible.

• Differences Without Opposition: How Each Outlet Performs Credibility Work

Observador and Público differ in tone and modality, yet they converge in treating mental health discourse as a mechanism for governing credibility. Observador more often performs credibility work through affective intensification and moralised threat: credibility is stabilised by dramatic contrasts (danger/deviance; shock/empathy) that secure interpretive certainty and channel public feeling. Público more often performs credibility work through a technocratic-procedural register: credibility is stabilised via documentation, institutional narration, and expert mediation.

These are distinct styles, but they are not oppositional in their epistemic consequences. Both tend to reinforce an evidentiary landscape in which institutional validation is privileged and where psychological legibility becomes a key condition of believability—albeit via different narrative routes. In both cases, mental health discourse functions as a shared infrastructure that (a) routinises institutional mediation as the preferred pathway to truth and (b) narrows interpretive space by foregrounding psychologised explanation and closure.

• Implications for Feminist Media Studies, Critical Mental Health, and Journalistic Practice

For feminist media studies, these findings suggest that contemporary credibility politics in sexual violence reporting are not only gendered and moralised; they are also psychiatrically scaffolded. Mental health discourse supplies criteria—stability, coherence, legible trauma—through which credibility is granted, withheld, or made conditional. This expands the analytic vocabulary for understanding how rape myths and “ideal victim” expectations are reproduced through seemingly humanitarian or clinical registers, complementing Portuguese scholarship that has mapped the persistence (and contestation) of rape myths within journalistic practice.

For critical mental health scholarship, the article underscores journalism as a key site where psychiatrisation is operationalised in public culture: psychiatric and therapeutic vocabularies circulate as instruments for ordering moral worth, risk, responsibility, and care (Foucault 1978; Rose 2018). In Portugal, recent critical work has similarly emphasised mental health as a field shaped by citizenship, human rights, user movements, and struggles over expertise—precisely the kind of public circulation of “psy” authority that becomes visible in journalistic credibility regimes.

For journalistic practice, the implication is not to eliminate mental health language, but to use it reflexively. This includes: (a) distinguishing between describing harm and using psychiatric framings as causal shortcuts for perpetration; (b) resisting the treatment of expert certification as the default route to credibility; (c) avoiding narrative closure that substitutes therapeutic scripts for structural accountability; and (d) recognising how ableist expectations about coherence and emotional presentation can silently condition whose testimony becomes believable. Trauma-informed and survivor-centred reporting can reduce harm, but these findings show it must also confront credibility gatekeeping—otherwise compassionate language risks reinforcing the very hierarchies it seeks to undo.

Finally, the corpus suggests that mental health discourse recurrently reinforces two core rape-myth dynamics. First, it sustains credibility suspicion by making survivors’ testimony conditional on psychological legibility (coherence, stability, recognisable trauma) and on institutional proof. Second, it enables perpetrator alterisation through abnormality grammars—clinicalised deviance and metaphorical monstrosity—that treat sexual violence as an exceptional rupture rather than as a patterned outcome of gendered power and institutional permissiveness (Tranchese 2023; Ventura 2014). In this configuration, mental health discourse becomes a double-edged credibility infrastructure: it can enable recognition and care, while also narrowing causal imagination, inviting punitive containment as common sense, and sidelining analysis of preventable pathways, complicity, and accountability failures.

• Limitations and Future Research

This study is intentionally qualitative and interpretive; its aim is theoretical refinement and explanatory depth rather than statistical representativeness. The Stage 2 sub-corpus is restricted to two reference newspapers (Observador and Público) and to items where mental health discourse performs substantive framing work. This focus strengthens comparability across outlets and years, but it also means the findings cannot be treated as a proxy for Portuguese journalism, or for other genres of media coverage (e.g., tabloids, television, radio, podcasts, or platform-native news). Reporting-oriented news genres were prioritised for analytical reasons, and opinion pieces and editorials were excluded; as a result, the study does not fully capture how mental health discourse operates in more explicitly interpretive or advocacy-oriented forms of journalism.

In addition, the analysis addresses discursive operations in published texts; it does not directly observe newsroom routines, editorial negotiation, legal risk management, or organisational constraints that may shape the selection and normalisation of “psy” language. The findings, therefore, describe discursive outcomes rather than the institutional processes through which mental health vocabularies are produced and stabilised in journalistic practice. Nor does it measure audience reception; claims here concern how credibility is structured in Portuguese journalistic discourse, not how readers interpret or endorse those structures. Finally, although the framework attends to ableist norms of coherence and “legible suffering,” the available material does not always support fine-grained intersectional analysis across race, disability, class, migration, sexuality, and age—an important direction for future work, particularly given how credibility hierarchies are unevenly distributed across social groups (Onwuachi-Willig 2018; Zarkov and Davis 2018; Rottenberg 2019). Future research could extend the eight-cluster framework to other outlets and formats, combine textual analysis with interviews or ethnography to trace how these framings are produced in practice, and deepen intersectional mapping of when mental health discourse amplifies recognition versus when it functions as a gatekeeping grammar that restricts whose testimony becomes institutionally and culturally believable. Further work could also examine how mental health vocabularies circulate between journalism and everyday speech, tracing how clinical and therapeutic language becomes normalised in public understandings of sexual violence and how journalistic credibility frameworks shape broader social interpretations of harm.

6. Conclusions

This article examined how mental health discourse operates within Portuguese journalistic narratives of sexual violence between 2014 and 2023, through a comparative analysis of Observador and Público. The study shows that psychiatric, psychological, therapeutic, and metaphorical registers do not merely “add context” to reporting. Rather, they function as a credibility infrastructure through which journalism adjudicates what counts as harm, what counts as explanation, and—crucially—who counts as believable.

Across both outlets, mental health discourse consistently performed three interrelated forms of credibility work. First, it stabilised uncertainty by privileging expert authority and institutional procedures—psychiatric and psychological assessments, medico-legal documentation, and formal evaluation—as epistemic anchors. Second, it aligned believability with norms of psychological coherence, composure, and institutional legibility, making survivors’ credibility more readily granted when their accounts could be translated into recognisable scripts of trauma, stability, and expert-verifiable harm. Third, it produced narrative closure by channelling resolution into medico-legal and therapeutic pathways—assessment, referral, treatment, recovery—and by moralising violence through abnormality grammars that render perpetrators legible as deviant exceptions. In combination, these mechanisms narrow the space for sustained engagement with gendered power relations, institutional cultures, rape myths, and the conditions of permissiveness and impunity through which sexual violence becomes persistently possible.

The article’s primary contribution is to demonstrate that mental health discourse functions as a credibility technology in sexual violence reporting. By bringing feminist media studies into sustained dialogue with critical mental health scholarship, the analysis shows how hierarchies of believability are routinely rearticulated through psychiatric and therapeutic vocabularies that appear neutral, compassionate, or technical, while continuing to reproduce gendered and ableist forms of gatekeeping. This matters not only because it shapes which testimonies are publicly authorised, but because it influences what kinds of explanation become culturally available: whether sexual violence is understood through institutional proof regimes and individualised therapeutic narratives, or through structural accounts of gendered inequality, coercive contexts, organisational failure, and rape culture.

Two further contributions follow from this central claim. First, the article positions journalism as a key site where psychiatrisation and psychologisation are operationalised in public culture: “psy” knowledge circulates far beyond the clinic as a repertoire for authorising judgements about responsibility, risk, moral worth, and legitimate care. Second, it advances an empirically grounded analytical framework—developed through the article’s clustered mapping of discursive operations—that makes credibility work visible in ways that are transferable across media contexts and suitable for comparative and cross-national research.

These findings complicate normative invocations of “trauma-informed” or “survivor-centred” reporting as automatic remedies. Trauma-sensitive language can reduce harm and signal care, but it does not by itself produce justice-oriented coverage. When detached from feminist and structural critique, mental health discourse may inadvertently reinforce ableist norms, elevate institutional certification over testimony, and constrain survivors’ political voice by rewarding performances of legible suffering. Survivor-centred journalism, therefore, requires more than careful wording: it requires sustained scrutiny of the epistemic assumptions that govern belief, recognition, and sufficiency in public narratives of sexual violence, including attention to how institutional authority becomes routinised as the preferred route to truth.

Considering the corpus, mental health discourse recurrently reinforces two core rape-myth dynamics. First, it sustains credibility suspicion by making survivors’ testimony conditional on psychological legibility (coherence, stability, recognisable trauma) and on institutional proof. Second, it enables perpetrator exceptionalism through clinicalised deviance and metaphorical monstrosity, casting sexual violence as an abnormal rupture rather than a patterned outcome of gendered power relations, institutional cultures, and everyday permissions. In this configuration, mental health discourse becomes an expedient means of managing uncertainty and producing closure: it can facilitate recognition and care, while simultaneously narrowing causal imagination, inviting punitive containment as common sense, and displacing structural accountability.

For journalistic practice, the implication is not to avoid mental health language, but to use it reflexively and accountably: distinguishing between describing harm and using psychiatric framings as causal shortcuts; resisting the treatment of expert certification as the default route to credibility; avoiding narrative closure that substitutes therapeutic scripts for institutional reform; and recognising how ableist expectations about coherence and emotional presentation can silently condition whose testimony becomes believable. Overall, this article argues that mental health discourse is now a central—often unexamined—mechanism through which sexual violence is made publicly intelligible in Portuguese journalism. The challenge, for both scholarship and practice, is to ensure that this vocabulary does not function as a credibility gate that privileges psychological legibility over structural explanation, and institutional validation over lived testimony.