The manner in which various media formats report events and topics that are considered newsworthy is an important site for making discourse visible. Discourses construct realities and are revealed in how objects are spoken about. The aim of this study was to gain a more sophisticated understanding of the way in which ‘common sense’ understandings were employed in establishing knowledge about mental health problems and the resultant production of power through an examination of how mental health problems are constructed in Irish newspapers. This study reports on 123 news items collected over a one month period from five Irish newspapers. The methodological approach adopted was discourse analysis, based on a Foucauldian understanding of discourse, emphasizing the ubiquity and inter connectedness of knowledge and power. The findings suggest that mental health problems were discursively constructed inIrish newspapers enlisting discursive categories of hiddenness, visibility, crises and risk, devastation, illness, psychosocial causation, recovery and professional treatment. These discourses operated to produce an understanding of mental health problems and mental distress as being an individual, biomedically defined phenomenon, beyond the control of the individual, dangerous and devastating to the person, others and society, constructing mental health problems as outside the locus and control of people who experience them, producing a need for the government of mental health. These ‘common sense’ understandings of mental health problems reinforce the superior status of psychiatric knowledge as the legitimate means of both making mental distress visible and as a means of response. Association with physical illness was frequently used to legitimize and de-stigmatize mental health problems. Competing recovery and psychosocial discourses were appropriated by the use of psychiatrically oriented language and by association with psychiatric structures. Representation of social factors related to causation was limited to proximal factors obscuring macro structures that are implicated in the creation and perpetuation of inequality, social deprivation and isolation. Critical discourses that challenge the legitimacy of biological explanations and psychiatry were largely absent.