The representation of mental health discourses in newspapers is improving nowadays and it becomes less stigmatizing than it used to be (Hildersley et al., 2020). However, with the outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic many people had to cope with mental health issues and experienced loneliness as well as other psychiatric disorders (Li & Wang, 2020). For that reason, by drawing on the theories of Semantic Preference and News Values and by following a Corpus Linguistics methodology, my aim in this study was to identify what kind of discourses can be found around mental health, if the tone of the coverage is negative or positive and what linguistic devices are used to express these two values. The results of the analysis suggest that the coverage of mental health discourses during the first wave of Covid-19 appears to be more negative than positive and the most prominent linguistic device that can be seen is evaluative language.