From deviance to diagnosis : cultural meanings of mental health
Keywords: Humanities and Sciences.
Sociology.

How Americans think about mental health has changed dramatically over the past several decades. Contemporary individuals are now more likely to seek medical treatment, take "mental health days, " or talk openly about mental health challenges. At the same time, stigma around mental illness remains despite destigmatization efforts by biomedical professionals and national organizations. People desire social distance from, and even fear, individuals considered mentally ill, and associate mental illness with violence. This dissertation examines these cultural trends and their consequences by asking and answering three questions using qualitatively informed computational text analysis and large text datasets: (1) What are American cultural ideas about mental health and illness? (2) How have they changed over time? (3) How do contemporary individuals apply cultural ideas to make sense of their own and others' experiences? In the first three substantive chapters, I employ a custom dataset of more than 100,000 articles discussing mental health and illness from an ideologically and geographically diverse set of newspapers. In the first chapter, I use topic modeling to track change from 1980 to 2020 in how mental health is depicted in the news and demonstrate how American cultural understandings of mental health and illness fall into four categories, or frames: mental health and illness as medical and/or policy issues, mental illness as an explanation for violent behavior, and mental health as a normal aspect of everyday experience. In the second chapter, I extend the methods of the first to describe how the connection between mental illness and violent behavior in the news media perpetuates its status as a deviant and stigmatized category. In the third chapter, I use novel methods of word embeddings to assess the connotations of mental health terminology. I show how Americans interpret mental health experiences, as well as less severe disorders like anxiety and depression, as genuine and legitimate, yet mental illness largely connotes dangerousness and deviance. Stereotypes of dangerous mental illness are also not evenly applied, but instead linked to both Blackness and masculinity. Extending and offering a comparison to the newspaper analysis, I also look at discussions of mental health and illness on the social media platform Reddit, to study how people talk about their own and others' mental health. In the fourth substantive chapter, I turn to social media to focus on contemporary conversations between everyday individuals. I demonstrate that by sharing narratives about their mental health experiences, users normalize and universalize mental health, and rely on the medical model in their suggestions for how to improve it. Yet through a focus on popular psychology and self-help, social media discussions of mental health position it as an ultimately individual experience. Across the full dissertation, I illuminate how the public conversation around mental health has shifted over time, and how individuals use pieces of that conversation to make sense of and decisions around their own mental health. In doing so, I unpack the connection between mental health beliefs and behaviors and cultural change