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.