Existential Health As A Public Health Construct In Swedish Print News Media : How a Contested Concept Moved from Periphery to Policy

Sammanfattning

Existential health (EH) has emerged as a contested public health construct in Sweden, marked by a 2024 government commissioning to the Public Health Agency (Folkhälsomyndigheten) to incorporate EH approaches into national public health policy. Scholarly consensus on EH’s definition, measurement, and policy role remains absent. This study aimed to explore how EH has been constructed as a public health construct in Swedish print media in the 21st century, and to discuss what these constructions suggest about its conceptual development. A corpus of 345 unique editorial articles containing the phrase “existentiell hälsa” (existential health) was assembled from Swedish media archives. Descriptive trend mapping was applied to the full corpus, and reflexive thematic analysis was applied to a purposively sampled subset of 101 substantively discourse-contributing articles, anchored in a constructionist epistemology. Three themes were generated: the contested construction, conceptualization, and condition of EH; secularization and postmodernism; and existential training, competency, and intervention. Coverage volume rose roughly 10-fold across the period, with substantive contribution growing more steeply than overall mention. The findings position EH as a construct partway through externalization, objectivation, and internalization, with implications for policymakers anticipating the opposition field, for practitioners working with existential dimensions in clinical and community settings, and for media and health communication researchers.