Open AccessMetaphors of mental illness: a corpus-based approach analysing first-person accounts of patients and mental health professionals
Author(s) -
Marta Coll-Florit,
Antoni Oliver,
Salvador Climent
Publication year - 2021
Publication title -
cultura, lenguaje y representación/cultura, lenguaje y representación
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.127
H-Index - 4
eISSN - 2340-4981
pISSN - 1697-7750
DOI - 10.6035/clr.2021.25.5
Subject(s) - conceptualization , mental illness , mental health , psychology , set (abstract data type) , schizophrenia (object oriented programming) , psychiatry , bipolar disorder , classification of mental disorders , health professionals , clinical psychology , cognition , health care , prevalence of mental disorders , linguistics , philosophy , computer science , economics , programming language , economic growth
In this paper we describe the building, manual annotation and analysis of a balanced corpus to assess conceptual metaphors on mental illness as used in Spanish blogger writing by patients and mental health professionals. The corpus was structured as eight subgroups: four patient subgroups (composed of persons who declared having been diagnosed with major depression, schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, or obsessive-compulsive disorder) and four mental health professional subgroups (psychiatrists, psychologists, social educators, nurses). The quantitative analysis identified similarities and differences between groups regarding the volume of metaphors produced and the topics linguistically expressed through metaphors. The most frequent metaphors used by each major group, patients and professionals, were qualitatively analysed, with the principal findings showing a set of source domains used to conceptualize all four severe mental disorders, thus pointing to a common conceptualization of mental suffering irrespective of the specific diagnosis, and two major types of metaphors, WAR and JOURNEY, used by all subgroups of patients and professionals to talk about their first-hand experiences.