Chapter 7 explores the labels associated with mental illness in more detail, specifically through naming analysis. I discuss prescribed forms for referring to people with mental illness (such as person-first language) and explore the frequency of such prescribed forms in the corpus. In addition, salient naming strategies in the corpus, particularly the labels ‘patient’, ‘sufferer’ and ‘victim’ are investigated. Using corpus evidence, I show that these labels are patterned to specific illness types. Furthermore, I argue that the tendency in the corpus to refer to people as quantities and statistics depersonalises people with mental illness. I argue that the ‘rhetoric of quantification’ (Fowler, 1991: 166) provides a way for the press to sensationalise news events related to mental illness which in turn constitutes the representation of mental illness as a ‘moral panic’ (Cohen, 1973).

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.