Psychiatrization in Czech lexical data: Everyday adjectives are acquiring clinical connotations

IF 2.3 3区心理学 Q2 PSYCHOLOGY, EXPERIMENTAL

New Ideas in Psychology Pub Date : 2025-03-06 DOI:10.1016/j.newideapsych.2025.101148

Vojtech Pisl

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引用次数: 0

Abstract

Interpreting ordinary experiences as symptoms of psychopathology may bias epidemiological numbers and undermine public mental health. Several studies document linguistic shifts underlying psychiatrization in English, but data from other languages are lacking. The current study hypothesizes that psychiatric terminology is increasingly used in everyday, non-clinical contexts while everyday adjectives describing normative mental states and traits are acquiring clinical connotations.

In an exploratory study utilizing computational linguistics, fragments of texts containing diagnostic (e.g. “ADHD” or “anorexia”), everyday psychological (e.g. “shy” or “sad”), or control keywords (e.g. “large” or “loud”) were retrieved from a large (>4bn words) corpus of Czech journalistic texts published offline between 1990 and 2022. A linguistic marker of the cultural aspects of psychiatrization was developed: clinicalness, calculated as lexical proximity to the clinical discourse using the wordscores algorithm. The expected correlation between time and clinicalness was measured by Kendall's coefficient for each of 46 keywords.

The frequency of use of diagnostic terms has been increasing in the Czech press between 1990 and 2022 (for the median keyword: τ = 0.74). The clinicaliness was increasing for everyday adjectives describing human emotions and behaviors (median τ = 0.07) and less so control adjectives (median τ = 0.03), but not in diagnostic terms (median τ = 0.01).

Our exploratory linguistic data are consistent with the notion of increasing psychiatrization of ordinary experiences but not with normalization of mental disorders. Confirmatory research is needed to verify the observed increase in pathologization of everyday adjectives describing emotions and behaviors.

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来源期刊

New Ideas in Psychology Multiple-

CiteScore

4.80

自引率

3.80%

发文量

期刊介绍： New Ideas in Psychology is a journal for theoretical psychology in its broadest sense. We are looking for new and seminal ideas, from within Psychology and from other fields that have something to bring to Psychology. We welcome presentations and criticisms of theory, of background metaphysics, and of fundamental issues of method, both empirical and conceptual. We put special emphasis on the need for informed discussion of psychological theories to be interdisciplinary. Empirical papers are accepted at New Ideas in Psychology, but only as long as they focus on conceptual issues and are theoretically creative. We are also open to comments or debate, interviews, and book reviews.