Semantic Shifts in Mental Health-Related Concepts

Mental health-related concepts have risen in prominence and changed their meanings in recent decades. I will present a program of research that: (1) introduces a novel computational framework (SIBling) to model the historical semantic change of these concepts, using methods drawn from computational linguistics and natural language processing; (2) demonstrates SIBling’s application to examine how mental health concepts have changed their meanings in academic psychology, media discourse, and everyday language; (3) makes sense of these historical semantic changes by illustrating related social and cultural dynamical processes, such as concept creep, pathologisation, and stigmatisation. Findings hold important social and cultural implications.