ArticlePLOS mental health2024
What should we call mental ill health? Historical shifts in the popularity of generic terms.
Article in PLOS mental health, 2024. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 1 paper.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
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Who cites it
1 citing paper in PubMed.
- It's Not Really the Words; It's How They Land: Lived Experience Perspectives on the Use of Language and Labels in Mental Health.International journal of environmental research and public health · 2026Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
2 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Substantial attention has been paid to the language of mental ill health, but the generic terms used to refer to it-"mental illness", "psychiatric condition", "mental health problem" and so forth-have largely escaped empirical scrutiny. We examined changes in the prevalence of alternative terms in two large English language text corpora from 1940 to 2019. Twenty-four terms were studied, compounds of four adjectival expressions ("mental", "mental health", "psychiatric", "psychological") and six nouns ("condition", "disease", "disorder", "disturbance", "illness", "problem"). Terms incorporating "condition", "disease" and "disturbance" became less popular over time, whereas those involving "psychiatric", "mental health" and "illness" became more popular. Although there were some trends away from terms with medical connotations and towards more normalizing expressions, "mental illness" consolidated its position as the dominant term over the study period.
Identifiers
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.