In Chapter 6, I argue that the terms ‘mental health’ and ‘mental illness’ have been used interchangeably in the previous literature on the representation of mental illness in the press. Specifically, I argue that using these two terms interchangeably (especially during data collection) may result in incomparable datasets. Through linguistic analysis, I show that the terms ‘mental illness’ and ‘mental health’ are distinct terms, and that the meaning of the two terms has shifted over the time period covered by the MI 1984–2014 Corpus. I argue that the lexical change I observed is consistent with pragmatic accounts of language change in which the language development is in part a result of euphemism (e.g. Traugott & Dasher, 2002).

This chapter provides a discussion of the reported findings. The research questions are revisited and caveats to the research are discussed. I provide suggestions for how research into the language of mental illness may be developed in future studies. I also discuss the practical implications of the research reported in the book.

Chapter 9 investigates if and how the symptoms of mental illness are present in the MI 1984–2014 Corpus by exploring the symptoms of each disorder type covered by the corpus. Specifically, using keyword and key semantic domain analysis, I explore whether the symptoms of mental illnesses are accurately represented in news articles on mental illness. In addition to corpus tools, I also qualitatively analyse the most prototypical text for each illness subcorpus (i.e. the text that contains the most frequent features of the illness subcorpus overall) to explore whether the keyness findings are also a feature of whole texts.

In this chapter, I show that mental health and illness is an increasingly important topic in UK society, both in terms of the number of newspaper articles covering mental illness-related issues and the increased prevalence of mental illness generally. I also show how the public are increasingly aware of the language used to discuss mental illness in the press. Moreover, I explain how the language used to discuss mental illness is being increasingly prescribed by anti-stigma initiatives. Despite anti-stigma activities and initiatives, very little research exists that explores the language used to discuss mental illness in the press using a purely linguistic approach. For this reason, I set out the research gap in the existing literature that this book goes some way to addressing. I also introduced the MI 1984–2014 Corpus and provide an outline for the rest of this book.

This chapter reflects a coming together of key issues and themes embedded in everyday work with consumers and carers. In recent times, the definition of a carer has expanded to include immediate family and friends, and may also include extended family members such as grandparents and cousins. In transcultural and other contexts, it is important to use humanistic language in line with a recovery approach; for example, the terms ‘support person/people’ and ‘support networks’ may be preferable to the term ‘carer’ in mental health practice and mental health nursing. This approach provides a foundation for human connectedness, and sets the consumer narrative as central to mental health practice and mental health nursing, specifically.The chapter introduces students to a narrative-based understanding of mental health and trauma-informed mental health care, as well as key concepts in mental health and mental illness. It discusses mental health nursing as a collaborative, specialised field of nursing.

This chapter introduces the concept of mental illness, how it is diagnosed, and the main diagnostic classification systems used in health practice. The experiences and symptoms of people living with mental illness – according to criteria from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM)-5 – are reviewed. It is emphasised that diagnostic criteria can be considered within an overall framework for conversation and engagement between practitioners, consumers, and carers, with the overarching aim of exploring and understanding the best response to distress and treatment approach to promote recovery processes. Criticisms towards diagnostic classification systems are also summarised. Finally, potential effects of the COVID-19 pandemic and its implication for people’s mental health are presented.

This chapter introduces the theme of mental illness in prison, situating it in the broader historiography of crime and punishment and the history of psychiatric care and institutional provision. It explains how our book redresses the neglect of prisons as a locus for the management of mental disorder, a major oversight given the number of mentally ill people confined in them during the nineteenth century. The introduction elucidates our particular methodology, with its emphasis on individual prison archives that provide a rich counter-balance to the sifted and mediated accounts of official inquiries and published annual reports. It outlines the potential of drawing on examples from England and Ireland, which, while sharing ideologies and with similar systems of prison administration, varied in interpretation and implementation. We summarise the expansion and remit of prisons in the nineteenth century, including the importance of the prison cell as a carefully curated space for reform and rehabilitation.

Chapter 6 outlines the growing momentum of prison reform, enacted by a broad range of prison reformers and within the prison administration itself, towards producing reforms of punitive penal regimes, including separate confinement. Critiques of late nineteenth-century prison regimes noted the continuing high incidence of mental breakdown in prisons and the detrimental effect of severe prison regimes. The chapter highlights how individual campaigners and campaign groups lobbied for the end of the separate system and for rehabilitative penal policies. However, while the Gladstone Committee inquiry of 1895 was hailed as a turning point, and the severity of prison discipline was eased earlier in Irish prisons, in practice change was ‘glacial’. The residue of the nineteenth-century prison system arguably remains with us today, in the physical structures of prison estates, in prison disciplines that still emphasise order and uniformity, in the retention of large numbers of mentally ill people and the imposition of solitary confinement, no longer a philosophy and method of reform, but a means of dealing with disruptive behaviour among prisoners and shortages of prison staff and resources.

Raúl’s decline and disappearance constitute the sadistic climax of the posthumous stories. Storytellers linger with relish over their accounts of his descent, after 1930, into poverty, illness, homelessness, alcoholism, police detention, and finally madness, institutionalization, and death. So enthusiastic are they about ushering Raúl to his end that they begin to declare him dying or dead decades before his actual demise in 1955. His death was permanently useful to tell and retell as part of a tragicomedy about the foolishness of persisting in being a Black person in a country that had outgrown them (or, in its great wisdom, had arranged never to have any). In this sense, storytellers merely conscripted Raúl into the broader narratives of always-impending (but never quite complete) Black disappearance that had circulated since his grandparents’ day. “Deaths” shows how the defamatory stories about Raúl’s decline and death, circulating since the 1930s in the press and popular culture, sped him to the sad ends storytellers envisioned for him. Between 1930 and 1955, Raúl’s trajectory as revealed by the archival record converges, in many important details, with the denigrating tales that took shape around him. But this chapter tells that story very differently. In part, Raúl’s difficulties in these years had to do with extensive transformations in Argentine society – economic depression, a military coup, intensified police repression, and the renewed vigor of eugenics and scientific racism. In part, too, his struggles reflected the fact that the journalists, photographers, police officers, physicians and psychologists who encountered Raúl during the last decades of his life were themselves informed by preexisting narratives about class, citizenship, and Blackness in Argentina. Using press coverage of Raúl, photographs, his police record, and his medical records from a hospital and two psychiatric institutions, I reconstruct these last decades of his life and demonstrate how they were deformed at every turn by narratives of Afro-Argentine death that were only strengthened, in storytellers’ eyes, by what they saw as Raúl’s sorry state. Finally, building on highly suggestive clues in his psychiatric file, the chapter closes with an alternative, or rather intersecting, re-reading of his life through the lens of queerness and same-sex sexuality.

Offending is highly gendered, with men/boys constituting most offenders whether measured by criminal legal system data (e.g., arrests and incarcerations) or self-report data. The number of incarcerated women has steadily risen for at least the past two decades in many countries across the world, and the scholarship and programming/treatment devoted to women/girl offenders has also been on the rise, particularly in the last few of decades. This chapter addresses the characteristics and needs of women offenders, particularly in terms of gender-based abuse and other trauma histories, mental health (e.g., mental illness and drug and alcohol addiction), and physical health (e.g., HIV/AIDS, traumatic-brain injuries, and reproductive health). An intersectional lens is used to describe how structural sexism, racism, and classism are key contributors to offending women’s experiences. The chapter concludes with best practices in treating women offenders (e.g., trauma-informed, community collaboration, and empowering services) and descriptions of some innovative programs.

In this chapter, working with scientific evidence, I build up a picture of the psychopathic personality which can be applied to my preferred account of moral responsibility. After sketching an introduction to the history of psychopathy as a clinical construct, I consider some disputes and controversies surrounding its diagnosis. I distinguish psychopathy from Antisocial Personality Disorder (APD), a rival construct commonly used in clinical settings. I also sketch the implications of evidence for a distinction between ‘successful’ and ‘unsuccessful’ psychopaths for the overall construct. I conclude that the Hare Psychopathy Checklist is the most robust measure available, a measure which describes psychopathy as a condition characterised primarily by emotional deficiencies. I then review neuroscientific evidence for structural and functional correlates and causes of psychopathy. I also review evidence for the treatability of the condition, concluding based on the current psychological and psychiatric evidence that psychopathy appears to be highly recalcitrant to the treatment methods that have been tried so far, and that some of these methods may even be counter-productive.