The results show how the concept of mental illness is used in different and often taken-for-granted ways and how the distinction between normal and pathological is a central underlying question. At first, attempting to understand health and illness by studying communication may seem curious; pain, illness, and psychological distress as well as new-found vitality and physical ability can all feel like they are experienced in a primal, corporeal way that is pre-linguistic. The aim of this book is to explore some of the ways in which discourse can be studied in contexts of communication about health and illness. Despite the fact that there is still a long way to go before the full potential of digital mental health can be realized, we would like to express our appreciation to the authors for their contributions to this Research Topic, and we look forward to continuing the dialogue and collaboration on this important topic. By using social media data, they proposed training a computational model for predicting depression using a wider range of linguistic features and demonstrated the importance of incorporating culture-related and suicide-related linguistic features into depression model training. It has been suggested that “constructing a business model” and “discussing tool maintenance and long-term hosting in advance” could be possible ways of overcoming barriers in digital mental health.
The Power of Words: Media’s Responsibility in Mental Health Dialogue
Consequently, public mental health is not just about the occurrence and prevention of mental disorders in the population, but also includes the promotion of mental health and wellbeing (2). Public mental health emphasizes the role of primary care in the provision of mental health services to the population. New evidence indicates that many mental disorders and suicides are preventable by public mental health interventions. Modern public mental health policies aim at improving psychosocial health by addressing determinants of mental health in all public policy areas. The full impact of mental health is largely unrecognized within the public health sphere, despite the increasing burden of disease attributable to mental and behavioral disorders.
How the growth of open access research in Mexico is influencing global policy
- In the same way, it should be acknowledged that the use of discourse analysis exalts the ability of linguistic meanings to influence social reality, yet it is also influenced by social practice.
- Another equally important concern about differentiating mental health or distress from mental illness is rooted in the ever-widening definition of mental illness43 and the fuzzy boundaries around what is mental illness and what is not.
- These are not problems to be solved by biomedical research, clinical psychiatry, or psychology.
- The research shows troubling shifts in attitudes to people with mental health problems receiving care in the community.
- We identified four dominant terminological clusters in the newspaper and magazines’mental health reporting, with mental health/illness conceptualized in terms of (a)danger and risk, (b) a lifestyle issue, (c) a unique story and experience, and (d)social trends and factors.
The change reflects the growing evidence of what constitutes cost-effective care, but also acknowledges the failures regarding social inclusion and human rights of the old institution-based care system (52). Responsible media coverage of suicides, based on media guidelines and monitoring of stigmatizing media reports, have been linked to reduced stigmatization in press and reduction of suicides (43,44). Suicides can be prevented by public health actions, and suicide prevention has consistently been shown to be highly cost-effective. Despite their good intentions, public service announcements are considered an ineffective antidote to the high-quality pro-drinking messages that appear much more frequently through paid advertisements in the mass media (39). There is rich evidence showing that conduct disorders, aggression and violence of young people can be prevented.
It is equally as nebulous and multifaceted as the concepts of mental health and stigma. Workplace settings are one example when employers are hesitant to hire or promote people with a history of mental health problems, although these discriminatory attitudes are typically subtle and indirect. This is known as associative or courtesy stigma, i.e. being stigmatized because of a relationship to an individual experiencing a mental health problem . Contemporary definitions of mental health stigma largely follow Goffman’s work, highlighting its discrediting attributes and the negative attitudes attached to it 4, 5. This definition also emphasizes the close interrelationship between mental health and social aspects of life.
Public mental health deals with mental health promotion, prevention of mental disorders and suicide, reducing mental Brand generosity and mental health health inequalities, and governance and organization of mental health service provision. We welcomed submissions that covered but were not limited to the mentioned aspects of sociolinguistic research in mental health. In recent years, the COVID-19 pandemic and other socio-cultural upheavals have brought mental health to the forefront as a matter of pressing public health concern.
If health is everything that contributes to a good life, we lose our grip on the concept of health altogether, and an investigation of health and health policy that abolishes the concept it is trying to understand has gone wrong somewhere. However we define health, it cannot include everything that might be relevant to living a good life. A person without friends may not be living the good life, but that problem does not seem best addressed by a health professional.
The discourse of personal recovery and equal dialogue is subject to a social practice that maintains a rational-structured political discourse with the aim of encouraging users to become independent and empowered people who manage without professional help. The purpose is to examine the professionals’ and users’ use of spoken language, which reveals what underlies the cross-sectoral collaboration in a mental healthcare context. Ideally, users should experience coherence in the efforts of services when they are discharged from a mental health hospital for follow-up in the community social psychiatric service. Health professionals, users, mental health services and governments aim to strengthen cross-sectoral collaboration 1,2. Social media mental health discourse is also shown to be quite diverse and more stigma-neutral than such discourse in traditional media. To date, little is known about social media mental health discourse and what drives it.
