7 - Named, Labelled and Referred to: People with Mental Illness in the MI 1984–2014 Corpus

Summary

Chapter 7 explores the labels associated with mental illness in more detail, specifically through naming analysis. I discuss prescribed forms for referring to people with mental illness (such as person-first language) and explore the frequency of such prescribed forms in the corpus. In addition, salient naming strategies in the corpus, particularly the labels ‘patient’, ‘sufferer’ and ‘victim’ are investigated. Using corpus evidence, I show that these labels are patterned to specific illness types. Furthermore, I argue that the tendency in the corpus to refer to people as quantities and statistics depersonalises people with mental illness. I argue that the ‘rhetoric of quantification’ (Fowler, 1991: 166) provides a way for the press to sensationalise news events related to mental illness which in turn constitutes the representation of mental illness as a ‘moral panic’ (Cohen, 1973).