A corpus-assisted analysis of language convergence and meaning divergence of ‘mental health’ in Asian countries

Abstract

There has been an increased use of the term ‘mental health’ to refer to more negative states or ‘mental illness’. This study examines the language and meanings associated with ‘mental health’ in English-language newspapers across five Asian countries: Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore, the Philippines, and China. The aim is to identify the common words used to discuss mental health and to assess the extent to which these words reflect their common definitional meanings across different cultural contexts. Methodologically, the study integrates language convergence and meaning divergence approaches with corpus linguistics to analyse the newspapers. The findings reveal that ‘mental health’ is frequently collocated with words such as ‘issues’, ‘problems’, ‘services’, ‘support’, ‘physical’, and ‘people’ across the Asian news corpora. It is found that these collocates often diverge from their definitional meanings and are often used in reference to more negative mental states across the Asian news corpora.