How mental health and illness have transformed from medical concepts into widely shared cultural ideasDiscussions about mental health are ubiquitous, and individuals’ “challenges,” “struggles,” and “crises” are frequent fodder for media coverage and online content. Mental illness, however, is strikingly absent from these conversations. Why are we comfortable talking about mental health but not about mental illness? In Our Mental Health, Their Mental Illness, Amy Johnson argues that as these two terms became widely shared cultural ideas, their meanings diverged. People can struggle with their mental health and still be considered “normal”; meanwhile, the language of mental illness is deployed to describe those who are perceived as abnormal—or even dangerous. Drawing on articles from major US newspapers published between 1980 and 2020 and Reddit posts from 2019 to 2023, Johnson explores how the public came to understand mental health and mental illness as two sides of a social—and not simply medical—boundary.Employing methods of computational text analysis as well as qualitative close reading, Johnson shows that despite open discussions of mental health, mental illness remains a stigmatized category, broadly used to denigrate certain groups and often deployed as an explanation for violent acts. The boundary between mental health and mental illness, drawn by actors other than medical professionals, clearly delineates who is normal and who is not, creating an axis of inequality that intersects with other axes such as race and gender. The twenty-first century focus on mental health has not created universal acceptance but has instead contributed to social division.
