34.1260, Review: Discourse Analysis, Text/Corpus Linguistics: Price (2022)

Tue Apr 18 23:05:02 UTC 2023

LINGUIST List: Vol-34-1260. Tue Apr 18 2023. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 34.1260, Review: Discourse Analysis, Text/Corpus Linguistics: Price (2022)

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Date: 22-Feb-2023
From: Pamela Villar González [pamela.villar.gonzalez at psych.uw.edu.pl]
Subject: The Language of Mental Illness. Corpus Linguistics and the Construction of Mental Illness in the Press

Book announced at https://linguistlist.org/issues/33.2036

AUTHOR: Pamela Villar González
TITLE: The Language of Mental Illness
SUBTITLE: Corpus Linguistics and the Construction of Mental Illness in
the Press
PUBLISHER: Cambridge University Press
YEAR: 2022

REVIEWER: Pamela Villar González

SUMMARY
The text focuses on the study of the representation of mental illness
in the press in the UK during 30 years: from 1984 until 2014. For
this,  the Mental Illness Corpus 1984-2014 has been created and
analysed. The importance given to this topic has increased in the past
years, and recently the expressions and vocabulary used for addressing
Mental Health and Mental Illness have changed and evolved a lot.
The book presents a very systematic explanation of how to create a
corpus and get the most out of it, so it could be interesting for use
by both students and researchers working with corpus analysis, media,
and mental health.
The book covers the theory and practice behind linguistic and
sociolinguistic corpus studies. In addition, the novelty of focusing
on the press and how it addresses the topic of mental health and
mental illness both from a quantitative and a qualitative perspective.
The book contains many figures, and tables to make more clear and
visual the information presented. It is internally structured as
follows:
Introduction
Starting from an infamous and quite recent example from the press,
this section introduces the goals of the book and the necessity for
this kind of study both from a linguistic and social perspective. It
describes as well the Research Questions that the author will try to
answer through the rest of the chapters, and introduces the key
concepts of the creation of the corpus (Mental Illness Corpus
1984-2014 (MI 1984-2014 Corpus)). After explaining the structure of
the book and the conventions, a conclusion completes this chapter.
This chapter presents some more real examples from the press
addressing mental health and/or mental illness, and how, thanks to
some initiatives, language has been changing in order to become less
offensive and stigmatizing the mental illness addressed. The corpus
contains 30 years of press and a total of 45 million words.
The Language of Mental Illness
This chapter describes the theory underlying the language of mental
illness by presenting different theories and reviewing the existing
literature. It starts by explaining why the author has decided to
focus on the press despite being in the time of ‘social media’. The
chapter shows the gap in the existing literature that will be covered
by the book. A 5-page-table presents a comprehensive list of studies
of newspaper data, mentioning that most of them focus on the field of
psychiatry.
Analytical Method 1: Corpus Linguistics
This chapter presents the analytical methods used in corpus
linguistics, starting from a general theoretical explanation of what
corpus linguistics is to the particular methods and analysis used in
this book. This chapter is a fantastic introduction for anyone who
might be interested in knowing more about working with corpora and
selecting methods to use.
Analytical Method 2: Critical Discourse Analysis
This chapter provides an overview of the Critical Discourse Analysis
(CDA) and the analysis from CDA used. This is presented from the start
(description and first examples of the use of CDA) to contemporary
research including computational methods. Through the different
subsections of this chapter, the analytical methods taken from CDA are
presented and explained. Again, this chapter is a fantastic
introduction, with many interesting references and background theories
for understanding CDA and its relevance.
Corpus Construction
This chapter outlines the process of constructing the MI 1984-2014
corpus. The importance of search terms (“terms used are in themselves
a reflection of the (compiler’s view of the) target population”), in
the process of building and analysis. The process of cleaning, the
creation of subcorpora, and how decisions about framing and terms used
permit an extensive and representative corpus which allows for
comparison of the years, and even different types of illness. Last,
but not least, practical issues and possible shortcomings of the
methodological approach are also presented and discussed in this
chapter.

The Shifting Meaning of Mental Health and Mental Illness
The corpus is here used to explore the terms ‘mental illness’ and
‘mental health’ and how they have evolved from 1984 to 2014 from a
semantic and pragmatic point of view. Their use has changed during
this time, especially ‘mental health’ coming to be closer and closer
to ‘mental illness’, and usually used as a euphemism for it. According
to the text, the new opposite (understood as the end of a continuum)
will soon be the word ‘wellbeing’, which has been more and more in use
during the last few years. Other key terms such as mental health
‘problems’, ‘conditions’, and ‘issues’ are analyzed as well. The
chapter presents many graphs that help in visualizing the different
uses of the words and how often they appear through time. The chapter
ends with a contemporary view of mental health, going deeply into the
concepts of euphemism and taboo, among others, that have a great
impact on language due to the reactions they trigger.
Named, Labelled, and Referred to: People with Mental Illness in the MI
1984-2014 Corpus
This chapter explores the names contained in the corpus to refer to
people with mental illness. The approach is quite different from that
of the previous chapter, as here it is explored how these labels can
encode ideology.
Two of the research questions (and sub questions) studied here are:
What linguistic strategies are used to name, label, and describe
people with mental illness?
What terms are present in the corpus for referring to people with
mental illness?
The term stigma is studied here, together with the references to
people with mental illness as quantities (groups, cases) in order to
depersonalize and raise panic through statistics. Examples are how the
word ‘victim’ is linked with PTSD, but with schizophrenia ‘patient’ is
more often used.

‘Suffering’ Illnesses and ‘Experiencing’ Symptoms: Ways of Talking
about Having Mental Illness
This chapter follows the analysis from the previous chapters, but here
focusing on verbs (instead of names), that is to say, exploring how
‘having’ mental illness is presented through the corpus. The next
research question, number 3, is addressed here: What processes are
associated with mental illness?
The terms ‘suffering’ and ‘experiencing’ have been targeted during
this chapter, as the latter is the one recommended by anti-stigma
initiatives, which are not based on linguistic research.
Do Newspaper Reports Accurately Represent the Symptoms of Mental
Illness?
This chapter realizes the analysis based on the medical context of the
illnesses to see how realistic and accurate the representation of the
symptoms of the disorders is in the newspapers. The research question
to answer here is number 5: Is the depiction of mental illness
realistic? Mental illnesses have been grouped by disorder type:
trauma, dissociative, bipolar, obsessive-compulsive, psychotic,
anxiety, eating, and depressive. This categorization is based on the
DSM-5 (The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Illnesses,
Fifth Edition). According to the author, some illnesses are more
stigmatized than others, since there are no reported cases of
celebrities with those disorders, which makes it more difficult to
align with the symptoms.
Conclusion
This chapter concludes the book by revisiting the research questions
and their answers. The implications for the results presented in this
book and the limitations of the analysis, such as the unimodal study
of the news (‘just text’, without taking into account where it was
presented, which image accompanies the text, or its extension) are
also presented and discussed. Suggestions for future research and the
author's conclusions complete the book.

EVALUATION
This book is indeed a pioneer and revolutionary study, as it presents
an outstanding methodology using the press corpus to study a very
important topic that has been systematically neglected, and not just
by many professionals from the press but also by linguistic studies.
In my opinion, the author has completely achieved her goals with this
book. The book fills a gap and brings together the fields of
linguistics, sociology, journalism, and medicine. Through this
exhaustive study of the words used by the press during 30 years
referring to mental health, we see how language has changed, but
especially how more importance is given to the words used to report
this sensitive topic by the newspapers. Furthermore, the only
recommendations came from charities when, in the past, many agents and
stakeholders  paid more attention to this kind of news.
I think the book presents a great tool for linguistics students and
researchers to review corpus literature and the methods and techniques
for creating a corpus. Furthermore, for journalists and other
professionals that need to deal with mental illness and/or mental
health, it will be very interesting to know more about how it was
represented in the past and how it is recommended to discuss the
matter nowadays.
The theoretical background of the book is very strong, well-organized,
and clearly presented. The chosen methods are very innovative and,
together with the analysis, provide interesting and useful results.
How words encode ideology and can change the perception of illnesses
by the broader public and the weight that celebrities have on this is
very fascinating.
The subsections about how to research this after 2014 and
possibilities for future research are very clear and helpful. I am
looking forward to this corpus being created and analyzed in other
English-speaking countries to compare their results, as well as in
non-speaking countries.

ABOUT THE REVIEWER

Pamela Villar González has a B.A. in English Studies from the
University of Oviedo (Spain) and a M.Sc. in Cognitive Science from the
Ruhr University Bochum (Germany).
Her previous work is in diverse fields like neuroscience (memory,
study of biomarkers in healthy ageing and dementia, sleep) and
psycholinguistics (brain lateralization of language, whistled
languages, autism).
Apart from research, she has taught Spanish (Ruhr Universität Bochum
and University of Duisburg-Essen (Germany), trained medical students
(Ruhr Universität Bochum), and has her own project on science
communication through social networks the 'Scientific Pamdemic'.

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