Mental health and conceptual change
I study how psychological and mental health concepts change in meaning, salience, severity, and use across scientific writing, news media, books, and general language.
This work asks whether terms such as trauma, mental illness, and schizophrenia become broader, more emotionally intense, more evaluatively charged, or more culturally salient over time. These questions connect computational semantic change research with psychological theory, concept creep, stigma, and public understandings of distress.
Key questions
- Do mental health concepts broaden into new contexts?
- Do psychological terms become more or less severe over time?
- Do diagnostic labels and person labels change in different ways?
- Can computational methods distinguish frequency change from meaning change?
- How do scientific, media, and general language corpora differ in the changes they show?