1 - Introduction

Summary

In this chapter, I show that mental health and illness is an increasingly important topic in UK society, both in terms of the number of newspaper articles covering mental illness-related issues and the increased prevalence of mental illness generally. I also show how the public are increasingly aware of the language used to discuss mental illness in the press. Moreover, I explain how the language used to discuss mental illness is being increasingly prescribed by anti-stigma initiatives. Despite anti-stigma activities and initiatives, very little research exists that explores the language used to discuss mental illness in the press using a purely linguistic approach. For this reason, I set out the research gap in the existing literature that this book goes some way to addressing. I also introduced the MI 1984–2014 Corpus and provide an outline for the rest of this book.