Corpus, Discourse and Mental Health

Book excerpt: **Shortlisted for the 2021 BAAL Book Prize for an outstanding book in the field of Applied Linguistics** Situated at the interface of corpus linguistics and health communication, Corpus, Discourse and Mental Health provides insights into the linguistic practices of members of three online support communities as they describe their experiences of living with and managing different mental health problems, including anorexia nervosa, depression and diabulimia. In examining contemporary health communication data, the book combines quantitative corpus linguistic methods with qualitative discourse analysis that draws upon recent theoretical insights from critical health sociology. Using this mixed-methods approach, the analysis identifies patterns and consistencies in the language used by people experiencing psychological distress and their role in realising varying representations of mental illness, diagnosis and treatment. Far from being neutral accounts of suffering and treating illness, corpus analysis illustrates that these interactions are suffused with moral and ideological tensions sufferers seek to collectively negotiate responsibility for the onset and treatment of recalcitrant mental health problems. Integrating corpus linguistics, critical discourse analysis and health sociology, this book showcases the capacity of linguistic analysis for understanding mental health discourse as well as critically exploring the potential of corpus linguistics to offer an evidence-based approach to health communication research.