Mental health disorders are conditions that disturb thought, mood, behaviors, or combinations of all three. Familiar examples include depression, bipolar disorder, posttraumatic stress disorder, and schizophrenia. Although symptoms range from mild to severe, they generally affect an individual’s ability to function in daily life and are more common in the 2010s than popularly assumed, according to reporting by the World Health Organization. Language in mental health disorders has been researched in two broad strands. First, many of them are treated by the verbal activity of psychological counseling (or psychotherapy), sometimes called the “talking cure.” Therapists apply clinical methods and interact with clients over multiple sessions to understand and modify their behaviors, cognitions, and emotions. On the one hand, this type of interaction provides rich data for linguists working in sociolinguistics, conversation analysis, (critical) discourse analysis, and pragmatics to investigate the linguistic nature of a socially important activity. On the other hand, a growing number of mental health professionals acknowledge the relevance of linguistic research and offer similar analyses from more clinically oriented perspectives. Both groups of researchers employ diverse methodologies, including discourse analysis, corpus, survey, and (quasi)-experimental techniques on different levels of linguistic phenomena, from words to rhetorical devices such as metaphor. While research into the language of psychotherapy generally assumes that clients have intact language and communication skills that support the treatment process, the second research strand examines the relationships between specific mental health diagnoses and language-related symptoms. Trauma patients, for instance, suffer a loss of ability to produce coherent narratives of their traumatic experiences. Whether language is seen as a treatment resource or target of affliction, one can identify fairly distinct descriptive or prescriptive/interventionist foci in the literature. Descriptively oriented studies are more common in linguistics research and have the fundamental aim of documenting characteristics of language in the underexplored context of mental health. The general assumption of such studies is that all social contexts of language use are of inherent interest. Therefore, research is not primarily aimed at improving how the activities underlying these contexts are conducted; that is, better treatment outcomes. In contrast, prescriptive or interventionist studies are more common in psychological and mental health research. The emphasis is not on understanding linguistic properties, but on the relationship between language variables and treatment processes or outcomes. A survey of both literatures, however, reveals an encouraging movement toward some meeting point in between, and closer collaborative work among linguists and mental health professionals. The growing number of synergistic research resources and publication outlets also reflects this.
The Endurance of Uncertainty: Antisociality and Ontological Anarchy in British Psychiatry, 1950–2010
