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On May 4, 1901, Professor Johan Vilhelm Hultkrantz wrote a post in Aftonbladet on whether conscription can have a beneficial or detrimental effect on the development of young people. It was the first time that the word pair Mental illness it appeared in the Swedish press. For the rest of the century, the term was used very sporadically, to rise after the turn of the millennium. Most of it was written about Mental illness in 2018, with about 25,000 visits to a multimedia text file.
Of course, this does not mean that everyone felt good during the 20th century.
The language of how we feel inside is an area characterized by changes and expansions of meaning. Take for example autism where the number of diagnoses has risen like an avalanche in recent decades, in large part because the definition was broadened to accommodate many more people.
Psychiatric terms it also gets into everyday language. Anyone with a special interest can call themselves aspig and the one who loses concentration can say he has a pitch adhd. I feel the same Depressed from the autumn darkness and have anxiety before how this chronicle is going to be received.
When the meaning of a word becomes so broad that it loses its usefulness as a technical term, it is time for professionals to find other words for what they want to define.
For a long time I thought that this was a language development that stigmatized suffering. If you have a diagnosis and I think I have it wrong, there is no qualitative difference between us. We are just on different degrees of scale.
But it may not be that simple.
“Stop talking about psychiatry”, urges the psychiatrist and researcher Christian Rück in his book “Unhappy in paradise” (Nature and culture). He does not think that we should use the concept of caring for ordinary feelings and experiences. The most mundane suffering, the abrasions of the soul, we can take care of ourselves. In this way, caring can heal the broken bones of the soul.
Most of the time he walks to storms against the fuzzy concept Mental illness, which seems to contain everything from stomach ache before the math test to fully developed psychosis, and which therefore relates to when the moon will turn into statistics of care that form the basis of various decisions.
I realize the problem. When the meaning of a word becomes so broad that it loses its usefulness as a technical term, it is time for professionals to find other words for what they want to define. But common language is, as is well known, more difficult to control. There we have to accept that the way we use different words is constantly changing.
Jonas Mattsson is the editor of Språktidningen.
This week’s language questions are published in collaboration with Språktidningen and Språkrådet. You can get answers to many other questions about languages in the Language Council Question Box. There is also contact information for the Language Council here.
Play this week’s word game: What do the words mean?
