What should we call mental ill health? Historical shifts in the popularity of generic terms

Abstract

Substantial attention has been paid to the language of mental ill health, but the generic terms used to refer to it–“mental illness”, “psychiatric condition”, “mental health problem” and so forth–have largely escaped empirical scrutiny. We examined changes in the prevalence of alternative terms in two large English language text corpora from 1940 to 2019. Twenty-four terms were studied, compounds of four adjectival expressions (“mental”, “mental health”, “psychiatric”, “psychological”) and six nouns (“condition”, “disease”, “disorder”, “disturbance”, “illness”, “problem”). Terms incorporating “condition”, “disease” and “disturbance” became less popular over time, whereas those involving “psychiatric”, “mental health” and “illness” became more popular. Although there were some trends away from terms with medical connotations and towards more normalizing expressions, “mental illness” consolidated its position as the dominant term over the study period.